Much of the world woke up yesterday morning to find that Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) party had won 15 of 120 seats in the Knesset, overtaking the venerable Labor Party as Israel's third largest.  Those who cared enough, or were obsessed enough, to stay up late following the election returns found out the previous night.  The results have left journalists and diplomats scrambling to decide what it all means, which in a sad and sorry way puts me ahead of the game: I've been condemning Lieberman since 1999.

So what is this movement?  One place to start is by comparison to other Israeli political phenomena, so we can begin by characterizing Yisrael Beiteinu as a little bit Kach, a little bit Shinui and a little bit Shas.  Kach, of course, is the movement of the late and unlamented Meir Kahane, who believed that Arabs should be expelled from Israel.  Anti-Arab rhetoric has been the most prominent feature of Lieberman's campaign, and he has escalated it to a level not seen in public since Kahane's party was banned.

The Shas analogy arises from Yisrael Beiteinu's role as a Russian-Israeli ethnic party.  Shas grew out of the resentment that the Mizrahim - Jews from the Islamic world - felt toward their continuing political and economic alienation.  Lieberman has played much the same role for the Russians, who feel that their concerns have been ignored and their communal leaders brushed aside or treated as tokens by the established parties.  There have been prior attempts at Russian ethnic parties, most notably Sharansky's Yisrael Ba'aliya, but these have either failed to gain electoral support or merged with more established factions, and many of their voters have turned to Lieberman as an advocate with more staying power.

The Shinui part - the secular part - comes precisely from the concerns that many Russian-Israelis believe have been slighted.  The Russians, most of whom grew up in the old Soviet Union, are less religiously observant than many other Israeli Jews, and they want civil marriages, secular family law and pork in the supermarkets.  About 300,000 of them are also not recognized as Jews by the Israeli rabbinate, and would like to regularize their status without submitting to Orthodox strictures.  Yisrael Beiteinu has thus emerged as Israel's strongest opponent of religious coercion since Shinui's demise.  In fact, its most vicious verbal exchanges during the last few days of the campaign were not with the Arab parties but the religious factions: Shas' chief rabbi compared Lieberman to Satan, and Yisrael Beiteinu's activists proved that the party's disloyalty rhetoric could be applied as easily to ultra-Orthodox Jews as to Arabs.  The religious parties are now attempting to form an "obstructive bloc" against Lieberman, not against Kadima or what remains of the Israeli left.

Another place to seek Lieberman's essence is by analogy to political factions outside Israel.  Here, there's a category into which he fits very comfortably: European far rightists in the tradition of Jean-Marie Le Pen, Joerg Haider or the Schweizerische Volkspartei.  Or, in American terms, he's Pat Buchanan.  He isn't an ideological socialist - he wouldn't be able to get Russian votes if he were - but his xenophobia is accented by a healthy measure of economic populism, pandering to the fears of those who were left behind when Israel dismantled its welfare state. 

Yet a third way of looking at Yisrael Beiteinu is the maxim "by his enemies you shall know him."  The Arab community leaders in Israel are numbered among his chief foes, and for very good reason: he has attacked them relentlessly, portraying them as a fifth column and threatening to take their citizenship unless they swear loyalty to the state.  We've seen already that the religious factions are also numbered among his opponents.  But, strangely enough, it's also hard to find a good word said about him by the ultra-nationalists of the National Union and Habayit Yehudi (Jewish Home). 

Why would that be?  The settler-based parties hate Arabs and so does Lieberman, so what's the problem?  The complicating factor is that Lieberman is a fascist, not a religious nationalist.  His nationalism isn't based on a theology of possession, he doesn't have much time for the settlers, and he's willing to divide the Land of Israel and even Jerusalem if that's what it takes to make the country more securely Jewish. (Of course, there's a typically Lieberman twist: he wants to swap the settlements just the other side of the Green Line for the Arab towns and cities in the Triangle, whether or not the Arabs want to be traded.) 

His core principle is instead loyalty to the state, with citizenship conditional on pledges of allegiance and national service rather than being a birthright.  That's a fundamentally opposed to modern Enlightenment democracy, but in a paradoxical way, it leaves more room for non-Jews than the religious-based nationalism of Habayit Yehudi.  Lieberman views traditionally loyal minorities, like the Druze, as honorary Jews in much the way that Uriah the Hittite gained entry into Israelite tribal society by fighting for King David.  He has advocated Druze causes in the Knesset, and one of the newly elected Yisrael Beiteinu deputies is a Druze from Shfaram.  His sort of nationalism is one the flamboyant Druze Likudnik Ayoub Kara, who would complain about discrimination one day and quote Jabotinsky the next, might understand.

So what impact will Lieberman have on Israeli policy?  In the short term, maybe not much.  Although the media has anointed him kingmaker, a government without Yisrael Beiteinu is possible and maybe even likely: neither Likud nor Kadima can meet his demands without alienating necessary coalition partners, so the political dynamic may well push the two major parties into a unity coalition.  And even if Yisrael Beiteinu does become part of the government, neither Livni nor Netanyahu is inclined to accede to its radical anti-Arab positions: perhaps in recognition of this, the early signs are that it intends to give highest priority to its secularist and electoral reform demands.  The immediate policy consequences of a Lieberman ministry might actually be positive, with Israel finally breaking the rabbinical stranglehold on family law and getting a real shot at reforming its dysfunctional governing system.

But that nevertheless pales in light of the damage that Lieberman has already done and continues to do: the legitimization of overt race-baiting in Israeli political discourse and the further alienation of the non-Jewish minorities.  That can't be undone even if, as seems possible, Lieberman is indicted in the next few months and the party falls into decline without his charismatic leadership.  Civil marriage or even the division of Jerusalem will be bought too dearly if the price is a compromise with vicious racism.  It isn't an absence of civil marriage that is tearing the region apart, and on the issues that really count, Lieberman's prescriptions are like gasoline on the flames.

I'm not Israeli, so I don't have a vote, but I greatly prefer the biracial post-nationalism of Hadash, the kind of partnership that was briefly attempted between Tawfik Zayyad and Yitzhak Rabin and that might have flowered had the latter lived.  What looks like happening now is further division of a society that is already far too tribalized, and a continuation of the murderous nihilism and anomie that is rampant on both sides of the Green Line.  Lieberman is as much an agent of that as Hamas, and ideological differences notwithstanding, he will pull Israel toward the same place.