‘The most boring election campaign in Israel’s history,” it was called by some people. Well, perhaps it was, but it produced the wackiest results of any election campaign in Israel’s history, too. Here are some of them:

* Nearly 40 percent of voting-age Israelis failed to vote – and this in a country that not too many years ago had one of the consistently highest voter turnouts in the democratic world.

* The party that six months ago was Israel’s largest, the Likud, and that governed the country with 40 seats in the Knesset, will now have 11 or 12 seats and has been reduced to a parliamentary irrelevance.

* The now third largest party in the Knesset, with a projected 13 or 14 seats and the travel-brochure name of “Israel Is Our Home,” is headed by an ex-immigrant from Russia who, besides calling for the annexation of large parts of the West Bank, has curiously proposed relinquishing Israeli sovereignty over areas of Israel proper that are heavily populated by Palestinians.

* Something called the Pensioners’ Party, which few Israelis had even heard of until several days ago, and that was considered a joke by most of those who had, won six to eight seats and will be a significant force in whatever coalition government is formed in the weeks ahead.

One could consider such things to be unrelated oddities, a fitting conclusion for an electoral campaign that began four months ago with the unheard-of phenomenon of a prime minister bolting his own, historically venerable party, at the head of which he was assured of certain re-election, in order to run on a brand-new slate that he chose to create ex nihilo. And yet one would be wrong. What connects the dots together in a single line is a widespread loss of faith in the political process that has peaked in Israel at the very moment in which the country must make some extremely difficult political decisions.

The Israelis who stayed home from the polls yesterday, as well as the Israelis who cast their ballots for parties like the Pensioners or Israel Is Our Home, were basically voting against parliamentary politics as a way of coping with national problems. Theirs was a protest vote, not without a sense of humor (who but a prankster would vote for a party of 70-year-olds when he himself is 22?), not only against the three major parties – Labor, Likud, and the newly-created Kadima – upon which, in one combination or other, the brunt of ruling Israel has to rest, but against the very idea of a broadly based party with a coherent set of social, economic, and foreign policies that takes into account the needs of an entire nation and seeks to adjudicate and strike a proper balance among them.

In the 17th Knesset that has just been elected, these three parties together command barely half the seats. Nearly all of the other half are controlled by parties – religious parties, Arab parties, a Sephardic party, a settlers’ party, a Russian party, an old people’s party – that represent narrowly sectorial constituencies. As wildly different from each other as they may be, one thing unites them all: The belief that they inhabit a country in which it is every group for itself, and in which there are no sufficiently cohesive common interests to justify entering into institutional alliances with other groups.

It is possible to blame many things for this state of affairs: The general ethos of “If I am not for myself who will be for me?” that is so common in Israeli society; the failure of the Israeli “melting pot” to integrate sufficiently quickly the country’s many different ethnic and religious groups under the rubric of a single binding identity; the disappointment of large sectors of Israel’s population – the poor, the elderly, new immigrants, and most recently, the settler movement – in the large parties, which have been seen as unresponsive to, or heedless of, these groups’ needs; and perhaps most of all, a sclerotic political system that has caused many Israelis to feel alienated by it and uninterested in participating in it.

Whatever its final composition, which may take weeks of negotiations to determine, the new government of Ehud Olmert will itself be a creature from a bestiary, an animal with two heads. One head, that of Kadima, which has emerged from the elections with 30+ seats, will use its brains to think of how best to extend Ariel Sharon’s concept of unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank. The other head, that of the Labor Party with 20+ seats, the left-wing Meretz with five seats, and the Pensioners, will busy itself with social and economic affairs and try to resurrect as much as it can of the old Israeli welfare state that has been gradually scuttled over the years.

It remains to be seen whether these two heads can work together, much less give consistent orders to the arms, legs, and other parts of the body politic. Each will look for allies elsewhere: The unilateral disengagement head toward Israel Is Our Home, which is largely focused like Kadima on the idea of a territorial readjustment vis-a-vis the Palestinians, and the social welfare head toward the Sephardi-run Shas Party, which is projected to have 11 seats and has traditionally fought like Labor for increased government spending for social programs, especially for those assisting the population that votes for it.

Even a two-headed animal, however, can only walk in one direction at a time. Can a two-headed government can walk in two? That’s the question that has been posed by this bizarrest of all Israeli elections.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.