But Israelis dislike Haredi representatives, who utilize political power to close stores on the sabbath, and demand support for young Haredi students who skip military service. And in this election cycle, Likud leaders have had to face the possibility that their alliance comes at a cost. The more unacceptable Haredi parties become to the general electorate, the more Likud is vulnerable to campaigns alleging, with solid evidence, that by voting for Mr. Netanyahu one is also voting for ultra-Orthodox dominance.

So, Mr. Netanyahu has discovered that the other camp has a straw man too, one that functions in a similar way. Which is scarier? Here’s the irony: The more Mr. Netanyahu succeeds in getting the Palestinian issue off the table, the more the voters have time to worry about other issues, such as state-religious affairs.

The politician that identified these dynamics better than all others was former Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, head of the Israel Beitenu Party. Mr. Liberman forced the second round of elections and ran a masterful campaign based on a simple strategy: He was the only one representing the mainstream, by tapping into both anti-Arab and anti-ultra-Orthodox sentiments.

Mr. Liberman has a long history of rallying anti-Arab sentiment for his campaigns. He once tried to pass a law that conditioned Israeli citizenship on a loyalty oath; he wanted the government of Israel to encourage Israeli Arabs to move to a Palestinian state by offering them “economic incentives.” In this election, he turned the same tactics against a new group: the Haredim. Mr. Liberman said that he will refuse to sit with ultra-Orthodox parties in the same coalition until his terms are accepted: among them, equality in military service, and math and English in Haredi schools.

Based on this strategy, Mr. Liberman almost doubled the number of seats he will have in the next Knesset, and made himself an undisputable kingmaker — no bloc can form a government without his support. More importantly, he may have also reshuffled the old map of Israeli politics. The besmirching of Arabs and Haredim during the campaign, often in words that ought to make a decent citizen cringe, resulted in both of these communities rushing to the polls to make their voices heard. If exit polls are to be believed, Arab Israelis and Haredi Jews will emerge from this election with more representatives in Israel’s parliament than before. Still, their political positions did not improve. In fact, the great social challenge of their marginality just became more pronounced.

The new rules Mr. Liberman imposed on the campaign mean that an Israeli voter no longer has to be in the pocket of a right-wing religious coalition to reject a political partnership with the Arabs. They mean that an Israeli voter no longer has to be a member of a center-left camp to oppose the ultra-Orthodox parties. Mr. Liberman is no Ben-Gurion, but he managed to re-create “without Herut and without Maki” for a 21st century reality.

This looks like a realignment of the political map that sends a simple and important message to Israel’s leaders: The mainstream wants to regain its dominance; the mainstream refuses to let minorities govern its future. The mainstream has a message for Haredim and Arabs: influence will only come with the acceptance of certain norms.