Winter arrived in Israel, literally and politically, on Tuesday. After months of a warm and rainless false spring, the tempests finally arrived on Election Day, as if an overly romantic cinematographer had waited for wild gusts and thunder before lining up the extras at the polling places and letting the cameras roll.

The results are grim and uncertain, and they portend a lasting political storm. It's true that centrist candidate Tzipi Livni apparently edged out rightist Benjamin Netanyahu: According to near final results, her Kadima party received 28 Knesset seats, one more than his Likud party. By custom, the leader of the party that wins the most Knesset seats normally forms the coalition and becomes prime minister.

The morning after the invasion began, I ran into a friend at a café. It was a quiet day in Jerusalem, cold and sunny. He'd received a text message, from his son, who was serving in an unnamable unit in the south. The message said that the soldiers' cell phones were being collected, so he wouldn't be able to call again for some time. Translated, it meant, "We're going in." My friend smiled, with a bit of effort, and then said about the war, "I don't think we had any choice this time."

His colleague, a long-haired middle-aged man with left-leaning politics, agreed. "We had to do something" about missiles raining on Israeli cities, he said. The only available "something" began with airstrikes and had now moved on to invasion.