Following Israel’s nail-biting election, nearly every political community in the country experienced triumph and despair. The initial results swung wildly from the first exit polls to the slow real-vote count; the bloc of parties loyal to the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, might yet win, and each side feels that its fate hangs in the balance.

So far, only one certainty remains: Israel’s bitter divisions are deeper than ever.

At 10pm Jerusalem time, three television stations published their exit polls by veteran pollsters showing a stinging loss for Netanyahu’s current government. In all three, his current coalition won just 50 out of 120 parliamentary seats, with 70 for the opposition. It was small consolation for Netanyahu that his Likud party held a slight lead over the main challenger, the Yashar party led by former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot.

Millions of Israelis who voted for opposition parties felt exhilarated. Together, four Zionist lists within the opposition ran a two- or three-seat lead over Netanyahu’s bloc, though neither of those groupings was close to a 61-seat majority. Eisenkot gave a passionate speech about the defeat of the “coalition of failure”, by a “larger and stronger Zionist majority”. Former prime minister Naftali Bennett, another leading opposition figure, declared........

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