Barring last-minute glitches, Ehud Olmert’s new coalition government is about to set out on its way. What kind of government will it be?

For this one has to look at its composition. And its composition tells us that it is not about to take any drastic initiatives – not even when it comes to “convergence,” as the policy of unilateral withdrawal that Mr. Olmert has identified himself with is now being called in Israeli English. (This is a rather lame translation of the Hebrew word hitkansut, which might better be rendered as “retrenchment.”)

On economic issues, the new government – whose largest party, Mr. Olmert’s Kadima, with 29 Knesset seats, is basically liberal but pro-business – will move slightly leftward, mostly by restoring or increasing social-welfare transfer payments that the previous government’s finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu, sought to curb. But this will involve on the whole specific expenditures, not broad economic policies.

Each one of the parties in Mr. Olmert’s coalition has come to him with its shopping list: Labor (19 seats) with its demand to raise the minimum wage, the Pensioners (seven seats) asking for higher government stipends for the elderly, and the two religious parties – Shas, on the Sephardi side, with 12 Knesset seats, and United Torah Judaism, on the Ashkenazi side, with six seats – calling for bigger child allowances (religious families in Israel tend to be large ones) and more aid for their educational institutions. And in each of these cases, Mr. Olmert and his negotiators have bargained and struck a deal. It will cost them money, but the main thing is that the treasury is remaining in Kadima’s hands – and with it, control of the overall government budget and its macro-policies, which will continue to be those agreeable to Israel’s business community.

Without a strong figure like Mr. Netanyahu to push for them, there will be no big economic reforms in the coming years – and no electoral reforms either. Bringing Israel’s electoral system of proportional representation more in line with the winner-take-all, election-by-district system of most western democracies was something that Ariel Sharon had hoped to achieve, and last March’s elections, with their unprecedented voter apathy and inability to produce a strong winner, showed how badly such changes are needed. Yet with Mr. Olmert’s coalition dependent on two religious parties whose strength derives from proportional representation, it is a safe bet that no changes will be made at all.

Ditto for constitutional reform. For years now, Israeli liberals have been talking about the need for a written constitution that will spell out just what rights Israelis do and do not have in such areas as synagogue-state relations (which include conversion, marriage, and divorce laws), fair housing and employment, freedom of speech vs. concerns of security and of ethnic or religious relations, et cetera. Here, too, however, Kadima’s hands will be tied, once again by its religious partners. The religious establishment in Israel has always been opposed to a written constitution because of its fears that a freedom-of-religion clause in it would enable the courts to strike down all or most of the laws that give Orthodox Judaism its privileged position.

And “convergence”? Here, too, one should not expect too much. Although Mr. Olmert’s government may be able to lead the horse to water, it is doubtful if it will be able to make it drink.

It’s a matter of arithmetic. From within his coalition, Mr. Olmert, if he seeks to go ahead with a Gaza-style unilateral disengagement in the West Bank in his present term of office, will be able to count on 55 sure votes: 29 from Kadima, 19 from Labor, and seven from the Pensioners. From without, he can depend on another five votes from the left-wing Meretz. This still leaves him with only 60 votes in the 120-member Knesset – enough to win parliamentary approval for disengagement, since the speaker of the Knesset, a Kadima member, would have an extra vote to break the tie with, but hardly enough to claim political legitimacy for it. For him to try to go ahead with disengagement anyway in such a situation would be politically foolhardy and would split the country far worse than did last summer’s disengagement in Gaza. Indeed, with a mere 60 votes, Mr. Olmert would not be able to govern at all.

Once again, then, it would come down to Shas and United Torah Judaism. Would these two parties go along with disengagement, giving Mr. Olmert a majority he could work with – or would they resign from the government at the point that it stood to be implemented?

This would be a difficult decision for both of them. Neither has a leadership that is particularly hawkish on territorial issues, and both represent constituencies that badly need government financial assistance; yet their voters, particularly in the case of Shas, are also more militantly nationalistic than their leaders and less disposed to major territorial withdrawals. The prospect of these voters punishing their parties for supporting “convergence” the next time they go to the polls is real – and the party heads know it.

So does Ehud Olmert. His most likely strategy in the years ahead, then, is to set the stage for “convergence” – finish the security fence, seek to consolidate international and especially American backing for a withdrawal to it, and strengthen his domestic political alliances – and then call for new elections on a platform of carrying it out. By then, he will have reason to hope, public backing for such a step will have gotten stronger and will be reflected in his own electoral success. The horse may be thirsty enough to drink the next time around … if it isn’t manhandled in the meantime.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.