For anyone who did not sleep last night, but spent the wee hours watching as television exit polls began slowly to give way to the actual results coming from the Central Election Commission, there was a surreal moment, sometime 2 o'clock and 3 o'clock, when the floor seem to give away under your feet.
In some ways it was very reminiscent of the same hour 19 years ago, when we realized that those who had gone to sleep with Prime Minister Shimon Peres were about to wake up to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Only then, the shift was by a fraction of a decimal point. Last night, huge chunks of votes moved from column to column, as the dead heat between Likud and the Zionist Union – as surprising and near-unimaginable it had been earlier in the evening – was developing into a rout of almost landslide dimensions.
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