Over a year ago when Ariel Sharon was contemplating bolting the Likud and founding a new party, I wrote in this column that he would be well-advised not to. In the first place, I said, his new party might not do as well on election day as the opinion polls were predicting it would do. And secondly, even if it did, as I said on September 4, 2005:

since it will be an amalgam of personalities and forces with differing viewpoints on all major social and economic issues except the need for further disengagements like the one from Gaza, it will in effect be a single-issue party — and yet, paradoxically, this single issue will be the one that it will be most unable to advance … And meanwhile it will have inflicted major damage on Israel’s shaky political structure, which has too many parties in the Knesset already, by severely weakening both Labor and the Likud through the introduction of a new parliamentary grouping which will itself almost certainly fly apart or shrink drastically in the end. This has been the fate of every initially successful new center party in Israel until now.

Although it’s perhaps too early to crow that I was right (it would be nice to be able to do so just to be able to balance all the times I’ve been wrong), it’s beginning to look as if I may have been. Not that I had any way of knowing that Ariel Sharon would have a stroke shortly after his new party was born, or that it would then be headed by Ehud Olmert as Israel’s next prime minister, or that a war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 would reshuffle all the cards in the Israeli political deck. Nevertheless, I was right in my first prediction and may end up being right in my second.

Kadima, the party Ariel Sharon created, indeed won last May’s parliamentary elections on the single issue of unilateral disengagement and this issue is indeed one that it is now unable to advance. The final admission that this was so came two days ago when Prime Minister Olmert declared, having been asked about further disengagement, “My priorities have changed …What seemed appropriate to me several months ago no longer seems so now.”

What will Mr. Olmert’s government concentrate on now that disengagement is no longer on the agenda? That is not a question he has to worry about. There is no lack of problems to deal with. The prime minister has to finish getting the army out of Lebanon, negotiate the terms of the new, expanded UNIFIL’s activities there, negotiate prisoner exchanges with Hezbollah and Hamas to get back captured Israeli soldiers, and figure out how to pay the costs of this summer’s war without presenting the Knesset with a huge deficit budget.

When he’s finished with all that, he can start to think about Iran. Israel does not have too much time to ascertain just what America’s intentions vis-à-vis Iran’s nuclear program is, and to make up its mind whether, if America is not ready to commit itself to a preventive air strike, it can or should attempt to do the job in America’s place. This is one of the gravest decisions any Israeli prime minister will have ever had to make and it will presumably take up much of Mr. Olmert’s time, although not so much of it, one assumes, that he will be prevented from preparing his defense against the corruption charges that the Israeli judicial system may soon file against him.

The trouble is that Kadima may not stick around long enough to wait for all this to happen. It has never been, after all, much of a political party to begin with. Ariel Sharon put it hastily together last autumn pretty much the way you’d put together a pickup baseball team on a sandlot, and to this day it has more Knesset members than it has registered voters. Few of these Knesset members feel any loyalty to one another, and none feel any to Kadima itself. At the first sign that the ship is about to sink, which could be on the day that charges against Mr. Olmert are served, many of them would be prepared to scuttle it. They would know that new elections cannot be far-off and that, when they take place, the same party that put 29 members of its list into the Knesset last spring might not be able to get a third of that number re-elected.

Where would the defectors go to? Many might return to the Likud, which they left together with Ariel Sharon when he abandoned it. They would find Benjamin Netanyahu waiting for them there with open arms, and augmented by their numbers, Mr. Netanyahu might just be able to put together, with the help of several religious and secular nationalist parties, a shaky right-of-center coalition that would take over the government.

Had Ariel Sharon never left the Likud in the first place, Kadima would not have arisen, disengagement would have not taken place, the Likud would have handily won last May’s elections, and Benjamin Netanyahu would have assumed the prime-ministership after Mr. Sharon’s stroke. Now that Mr. Sharon did leave the Likud, Kadima may soon cease to exist, disengagement will still not have taken place, and Benjamin Netanyahu will very likely assume the prime-ministership once Ehud Olmert departs. It will have been a very complicated way to cover a short distance.

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