(May 18) Ehud Barak didn't simply win the premiership last night. Binyamin Netanyahu did not just concede defeat and announce his departure from the Likud leadership. The change went far deeper than the personal fates of the two protagonists.

The entire political picture shifted so dramatically that it virtually wiped out everything we had become so used to in the past 22 years. Gone is the tie between Left and Right. It was decisively broken and it might stay broken for many years to come.

What happened last night was not only a Barak landslide. It was a rout for the entire right wing. The Likud shrank back to the diminutive size of the old Herut, but without the charismatic leadership of old. For the Right, this is far worse than the blow it suffered in 1992. Then both blocs were of roughly equal size and the Right could complain about radical policy shifts without a convincing majority. Barak will be far freer to pursue the line he prefers than the late Yitzhak Rabin was. The Right will be far more powerless to oppose him than it was during the Rabin tenure. This is not a marginal loss, but an unequivocal statement by the voters.

In essence, what happened yesterday is the mirror image of what took place on another May 17 - in 1977, when 29 years of uninterrupted Labor hegemony came to an end. Netanyahu had no alternative but to elegantly vacate the stage. Had he not stepped aside, he would have been savaged not only by his foes on the Left, but also by ambitious would-be successors from within his party. His situation would have been untenable.

Netanyahu did what no previous loser in Israeli politics had ever done. He quit immediately and with dignity. Even his relentless foes, who had spent the past three years demonizing him, must grudgingly admit that they had witnessed something unprecedented here - a gracious resignation and unstinted congratulations for the man who defeated him. Yitzhak Shamir stepped down in 1992, but he never got around to congratulating Rabin. Shimon Peres never quit, despite his numerous losses.

The Likud, whose Knesset list had also taken a terrible beating, will have a hard time rehabilitating itself. It will now be thrown into a no-holds-barred war of succession. Perhaps only Ariel Sharon can now calm his party's stormy waters, but the Likud now lacks an obvious candidate for leadership.

But beyond Barak's triumph and Netanyahu's absolute rout, these elections yielded extremely significant results in the Knesset race. The second-ever elections conducted under the split ballot system fragmented the large parties even further than than was the case three years ago. The plain fact is that if both large parties were put together, they still do not reach the size of the Mapai contingent in its better years.

Barak has a very clear blocking majority, and better coalition-forming opportunities than any of his more recent Labor predecessors, but he will have to deal with a host of small parties, because the 15th Knesset will have even more factions than the 14th, and most of the lists will be even tinier, often working at cross purposes. The smaller lists will be united by one overriding interest - to protect the electoral system which got them where it did. Any attempt to amend it will become even more difficult, if not impossible. The small lists now have the ability to preserve the system which could become the undoing of the large parties.

The one smaller party which was not trimmed yesterday was Shas, whose voters obviously thumbed their noses at the legal system and at the entire establishment. As usual, Shas's success came clearly and directly at the Likud's expense, and the Likud was helpless. It knew Shas was taking a big bite out of its support, but because of the separate prime ministerial race in which Netanyahu could not alienate any sector, the Likud could not defend itself. It probably will not be able to do so in the future either, unless Aryeh Deri disappears behind prison bars and is gradually weakened over the years.

If Shas does somehow enter the new coalition, it will probably switch its allegiance away from the Likud, at least for the time being, before facing the voters in the next election.

This will leave the entire right wing much weaker than it has been in many decades. The Likud's decline was not offset by growth of the National Union, which is perhaps the single greatest loser of this campaign, even more so than the Third Way and Tsomet which disappeared, and the Center Party which fizzled out. The Right's collective flop carries with it immediate, far-reaching ideological and policy implications. It brought Netanyahu down over Wye, but it ended up cutting its nose to spite its face.