Two new governments in a single week: Prime Minister Sharon’s Likud-Labor-Torah Judaism coalition in Jerusalem and Mahmoud Abbas or Abu-Mazen’s post-Arafat Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. What can be hoped for in terms of relations between them?

In the worst case, not very much. In the best case, some valuable practical cooperation on the ground based on the understanding that no comprehensive solutions are possible.

Despite the expectations of a world anxious to return to the optimism of the heady days of Oslo, no big Israeli-Palestinian breakthrough is going to take place. On the day, near or far, on which Mr. Sharon and Mr. Abbas step down from the positions they now occupy, there still will be no Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.

This is so because neither side is capable of making the concessions that would meet the other side’s minimal demands. The Israel of the year 2000, whose prime minister Ehud Barak was prepared to withdraw more or less to the old 1967 borders, no longer exists. The Palestinian Authority of the year 2000, which was not prepared to surrender the “right” of Palestinian “refugees” to return to their “homes” in Israel, still exists. Between two such governments, no overall settlement can or should be expected.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Although a formal peace might be nice, it isn’t what Palestinians and Israelis most need at this point. They can do without it provided they have other things: An end to Palestinian violence against Israel, an end to Israeli domination of Palestinians, and a climate in which both sides can turn their attention away from each other in order to deal with internal problems.

What is called for right now is progress on all three of these fronts. This is not unfeasible.

From Israel’s end, Mr. Sharon’s Gaza withdrawal plan is a good beginning. There was always something absurd about the need to protect several thousand Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip at the cost of the daily disruption of the lives of over a million Palestinians living in the same area – an area in which, it so happens, there was never a sizable Jewish presence in all of history. With the settlers and the Israeli army gone, the Gazans will finally have the opportunity, granted to them de jure but not de facto in 1993, to conduct their business without outside interference.

Yet they will only be able to do so, it goes without saying, if, once withdrawal takes place next summer, there is a complete cessation of the mortar and rocket attacks now being launched from Gaza against Israeli towns and population centers like Sderot. If these attacks continue afterward, retaliatory Israeli strikes will continue too, and the inhabitants of Gaza will have achieved nothing.

This means that Mr. Abbas has to use the coming months to get a firm grip on the Palestinian security apparatus in Gaza, so that it can impose the law and order missing there now. This will not be easy given the strong presence of Hamas and the lack of territorial contiguity with the West Bank. Israel can help by allowing the Palestinian president to re-arm local policemen, transfer necessary forces to Gaza from elsewhere, and so on. If by the end of 2005 Gaza is quiet and Israel is permanently gone from it, a model will have been created for the next step.

This will be the beginning of Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from most of the West Bank, which will end, not on the 1967 border, but on the security fence now being built – in some places along this border and in others well beyond it – to include major blocs of Jewish settlements. This fence is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2005, and if all goes well with the disengagement from Gaza, 2006 may see the beginnings of a similar process along Israel’s eastern frontier.

Needless to say, the political battle in Israel over Gaza will seem small-time next to the battle over the West Bank. (Indeed, the battle over Gaza is in many ways the first skirmish over the West Bank.) The pro-unilateral withdrawal forces can win it only if Mr. Abbas does in the West Bank what he will first have had to do in Gaza – that is, put a final end to the violent intifada that he has stated his opposition to and convince Israelis that leaving close to 90% of the area will not bring in its wake new hostilities and a rain of rockets on Israel proper because the Palestinians feel that the security fence has stolen 10%.

If Mr. Sharon and Mr. Abbas can help each other to get this far, Israel and the Palestinians will be, not at peace, but permanently separated and out of each other’s hair. This is perhaps as much as can be hoped for in the present generation, and it will not be easy to achieve even that much.

As for the rest of the world, it can help by meddling as little as possible, and especially, by not trying to pressure the two sides to fulfill its favorite fantasy of a full-fledged Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement. This is especially true of Europe, whose foreign ministers and heads of states are already full of intoxicating visions of a European-abetted Oslo II, starring Abu-Mazen in place of Arafat.

Oslo I was quite enough. If Israel and the Palestinian Authority try again to solve everything, they will end up again by solving nothing. If they bite off only what they can chew, the results may be much more satisfying.

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