It turned out – as BICOM had been pointing out to anyone who would listen – there never was a lurch to the Right in Israel. Yes, the Right itself has moved to the Right; a new annexationism is alive in parts of the Likud and, especially, in Jewish Home, the pro-settler party that rejects the two-state solution outright. But the overall size of the Right’s vote was not increasing – it was being redistributed within the Right.

And, it turns out, some of it was actually being lost to the centre-Left. In the end, Netanyahu “plummeted to victory” as Israeli columnist Bradley Burston smartly put it, while the big winners were a resurgent centre-Left.

Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid won an astonishing 19 seats. Lapid is a hugely popular and telegenic news anchor. He only set up his party in 2011. Fresh, rhetorically anti-establishment, he hand-picked his list of candidates to exclude all sitting politicians. He presented himself as the champion of a middle class that has had a bellyful. He tapped into the spirit of the massive middle-class social protest movement of 2011 (which, it turned out, had not gone away) telling it that every group in Israel has someone to bat for it in the Knesset except one: the majority. The majority was the milk-cow when it came to taxes, the reservist when it came to fighting, and the subsidiser of the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox who did not participate in the army or the workforce. The middle class has been carrying Israel on its back, and now it had a champion.

But Lapid was not the only centre-Left winner. The Labour Party, so recently down and seemingly out, increased its representation to 16. Former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni’s new Hatnua party – created only seven weeks ago and campaigning hard on the need for Israel to divide the land in order to remain a Jewish and democratic state – won a creditable 6, while the socialist-Zionist party Meretz doubled its representation from three to six seats.

Could there be a government of the centre-Left? At 1am I listened to the very excited (and somewhat shocked) No. 6 on the Meretz list talk breathlessly of the possibility. And Labour’s leader used her speech last night to argue for the centre-Left to come together and form a government without Likud and Netanyahu.

It is extremely unlikely. Netanyahu will almost certainly become PM, but he cannot govern without some of the 47 centre Left MKs. For real lasting stability in the face of domestic challenges and foreign threats, including from Iran, he will need quite a lot of them. The leverage this gives the centre-Left (assuming it does not completely misplay its hand in the negotiations that now begin and which could last some weeks) could decisively shape politics in Israel.

Nothing is certain, but the centre-Left could use its weight in a new coalition to shape domestic policy about what are called “the social gaps” (rising social inequality, the poverty of the 20 per cent, the high cost of living, the squeezed middle class) and “burden-sharing” (the widespread demand to end the very low rates of participation of the Haredim or ultra-Orthodox communities in either the Army or the workforce).

And the unexpected strength of the centre-Left might also have a dramatic impact on the peace process. There is a majority in the next Knesset for a seal-the-deal agreement with the Palestinians. Lapid – who amazingly may now be offered the foreign ministry by Netanyahu – supports the two-state solution and has called for good-faith negotiations with the Palestinians as a matter of urgency for Israel. His voice is the voice of a new Israelism – patriotic, liberal, democratic.

His list contains long-time two-staters, such as ex-Shin Bet head Yaakov Perry, and the ex-Meretz Mayor of Netanya. More, Lapid did in 2013 what Livni did not do in 2009 – he acted as a bridge across which centre-Right votes passed to the Left (rather than hovering up far-Left Meretz voters as Livni did ). He might repeat that trick in the foreign policy arena. And Netanyahu himself is – lest we forget – committed to the two-state solution since his Bar Ilan speech and he is not blind to international realities.

Last night an Israeli, not a Lapid supporter, turned to me as we stayed up at the giant TV screen and whispered: “Perhaps there is a future.” Today, one senior commentator I spoke to told me that negotiations are a matter of months away. At the very least, the peace process will return to the agenda in a way we have not seen since 2008. Not least because there is a new American Secretary of State who would like the US to play a proactive role, who thinks there is linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other American interests in the region, and who will visit the region, including Israel, in February to assess what is possible.

Peace, of course, is not in Israel’s gift. There will be two parties in any negotiation. Nonetheless, in the nick of time, hope is back.

Read the article in full at the Telegraph.