THE ATMOSPHERE was more like that of a football match than a political victory celebration. For two hours before the team members came out, the fans danced wildly and sang their praises. They held posters of their favourite players, and "witty" placards extolling their virtues and the deficiencies of their opponents.
Occasionally they even burst into terrace style chanting: "Ooh aah, what happened?" they jeered at one point. "Peres got stuffed." (In Hebrew, the two sentences rhyme.)
When the announcer finally began calling out the names, they cheered long and hard after each, but reserved special enthusiasm for the beloved veterans - men like Ariel Sharon, a key victory strategist - and for the most glittering of the rising youngsters, such as Limor Livnat, a rare woman in a game still overwhelmingly male dominated.
It was a bit of a shock when the star came out with his wife by his side, though they gave her a gracious reception, too. But they waited until he had placed her gently but firmly in her seat, and taken his place at the podium, before roaring the roof off.
Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu (46), commando fighter turned architecture student, government spokesman, deputy minister, party leader, and now set to become Israel's ninth and youngest prime minister, gratefully drank in the applause, making no effort to silence the throng.
"He's great, he's great, he's great," they sang. He smiled that closed mouth smile. "Long live Bibi, king of Israel," they chanted. He waved and nodded, for it was so.
And when he spoke, as ever, each line was carefully calculated. As throughout his stunningly successful election campaign, he took care to press all the right buttons.
Methodically he addressed every section of his audience in turn, those in the hall and watching here and abroad on TV, distributing reassurance to all. To the bitterly disappointed supporters of the defeated prime minister Shimon Peres - 49.5 per cent of Israeli voters - he swore to be "the prime minister of all of you".
He insisted he could lead a government that would keep secular Jews happy while not dismaying the religious Community. He pledged to maintain Israel's relations with friendly Arab states and build new links to hostile ones.
And each gloriously uncomplicated commitment was met with a new round of cheering. But this crowd was not entirely sporting in nature. Now and then, the fans got out of hand, jeering the "leftist" Israeli media so loudly at one point that Mr Netanyahu had to calm them down. Stop abusing the journalists, he demanded adding, somewhat bizarrely "These elections proved that there is a God". Perhaps his point was that you don't need TV if the Lord is on your side.
Only once did the mood turn really ugly, and that was (as Mr Netanyahu knew full well it would) when he asked the faithful to put their hands together for the loser, Mr Peres. On cue, the booing and the hissing erupted. And then, as he had doubtless foreseen, Mr Netanyahu was able to play the great conciliator, waving for silence and declaring that he had a "special admiration" for Mr Peres, a man who had made "50 years of outstanding contributions to the state".
The speech over, they sang the national anthem, and Mr Netanyahu stood tall and proud, satisfied at a job well done. But this was a friendly, before a home crowd. He'd been able to coast, to take his success for granted.
Today, the slightly harder work begins - the work of building a coalition involving five or six parties with many mutually exclusive demands ultra Orthodox factions that want to close down McDonalds, on one side, and a Russian immigrant party bent on championing secular rights, on the other.
And in two weeks, when that government is sworn in at the Knesset, the seriously hard work commences. That is negotiating a Middle East peace policy that will not cause the collapse of relations with the Palestinians, Jordan and Egypt, but will still appease the hardline, pro settlement voters who brought him to power. Only then will we see what Mr Netanyahu and his team are really made of.
. Reuter adds: Mr Peres said yesterday in his first speech since losing the election that the Jewish state must honour its peace deals with the PLO.
"Right now our nation must respect the agreements that we have achieved even if we don't like the dreams that our partners may have," Mr Peres said in an emotional speech at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
He said Israel must also make peace with Syria and Lebanon.
Mr Peres said that Mr Arafat, once branded a terrorist by Israel and now its partner in peace, had expressed dreams no different from those of the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who in 1979 signed the first Arab peace treaty with Israel when it was led by the Likud party's Menachem Begin.
During a speech that moved his audience to give him three standing ovations, Mr Peres said: "I want to wish my successor all the best. The only thing I can say is that while I am . . . changing my post, I am not going to change my positions."