Tzipi Livni, the head of the Kadima party, can credibly claim victory in the elections on Tuesday because her party won the most seats. Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud party can also claim victory as the head of the largest party in the larger of the two coalitions, the national camp.

But the real winner was the politically and personally unpredictable figure, Avigdor Lieberman, 50, of the Yisrael Beiteinu party. A Moldovan immigrant who started his career in Likud and then served as director-general of Netanyahu’s prime ministerial office, he founded Yisrael Beiteinu in 1999.

Lieberman has introduced a new issue into Israeli domestic politics–the place of the country’s Arab citizens. Noting their increasingly public disloyalty to the state, he has argued that they should lose their citizenship and their right to live in Israel unless they declare their loyalty to the Jewish state.

This topic has clearly struck a nerve among the Israeli Jewish electorate and prompted responsible Arab voices to acknowledge that Israeli Arabs have “managed to make the Jewish public hate us.” As I wrote in 2006, Israel’s “final enemy” may finally be joining the battle. The consequences of this for the Arab-Israeli conflict as a whole could well be profound.

– Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.