Sunday’s 17-to-5 Israeli cabinet vote for Ariel Sharon’s Gaza disengagement plan was more one-sided than had been expected. This wasn’t because any of the fence-sitting ministers changed their minds at the last moment about the plan’s wisdom. It was because they understood that it can’t be stopped and has wide popular support and because they did not want to be on the politically or historically losing side.

They also understood, as demonstrated by their even more lopsided 21-to-1 vote on behalf of the planned route of the southern half of the West Bank security fence now under construction, that the prime minister has precisely what he has been accused all along by his critics of lacking: A grand vision and a clear sense of exactly where he wants to take the nation.

The critics of the Gaza disengagement plan have, in addition, wrongly accused Mr. Sharon of something else. They have said that, in pushing through a fateful policy shift vis-a-vis the Palestinians and Israel’s presence in the occupied territories without first calling for a referendum or national elections, he is committing the same mistake made by Yitzhak Rabin in going to Oslo in 1993. Like Rabin, Mr. Sharon, they charge, has reneged on his campaign promises for the sake of a naively optimistic gamble that does not take into account the pitfalls ahead.

Yet Mr. Sharon did not (as Rabin indeed did) deceive his voters, nor is he being (as Rabin indeed was) naive.

Yitzhak Rabin was elected in 1992 on a platform of opposing the creation of a Palestinian state and of not negotiating with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which he then proceeded to welsh on. Ariel Sharon was elected in 2001 on a platform of accepting the unavoidability of a Palestinian state and of the “painful compromises” that this would entail. If not in the Gaza Strip, an area inhabited by 8,000 Jews and well over a million Palestinians, just where did Mr. Sharon’s critics think these “compromises” would be made and on what territory did they expect a Palestinian state to be located?

Moreover, while Rabin’s naivete lay in his belief that the PLO under Yasser Arafat was really interested in a long-term peace settlement with Israel and that there were no insuperable barriers in its way, Ariel Sharon’s thinking is exactly the opposite. He does not believe in the possibility of a formal Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty in the foreseeable future. This is why he wants Israel to unilaterally draw its permanent borders and rid itself of the burden of millions of militarily occupied Palestinians.

Mr. Sharon’s analysis of the situation is far removed from the catastrophic innocence with which Yitzhak Rabin went to Oslo. Based on Israel’s bitter experience with the Palestinians since 1993, it includes the following assumptions:

1. In return for a formal peace, the Palestinians will accept nothing less than a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders, including the re-partitioning of Jerusalem. Any modifications in these borders will have to be mutual, involving equal territorial concessions on both sides.

2. Even if Israel were to agree to this, the Palestinians would continue to dream of eventually dismantling the Jewish state by tilting its internal demographic balance in favor of its Arab population. They will therefore never agree to an unequivocal surrender of the so-called right of return of the Palestinian “refugees,” which will be an issue that will continue to fester.

3. The hope that the democratization of Palestinian society and political life will change this prognosis and produce a greater Palestinian readiness to make concessions to Israel is misadvised. On the contrary, democratization will, in the short run, only harden Palestinian positions by increasing the political strength of militantly anti-Israel organizations like Hamas and pro-“right of return” sectors like the economically downtrodden population of the “refugee camps.”

4. For Israel to sit tight and remain where it is, continuing to control millions of militarily ruled Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, would be a suicidal course. It would soon lead to a point of no return at which no relinquishing of these areas would any longer be possible, with the consequence that Israel would either become a pariah apartheid state or cease to be a Jewish one. Indeed, the strength of the resistance to the Gaza disengagement plan shows that this point has nearly been reached already.

5. Israel’s only rational option is thus to withdraw unilaterally from the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank while keeping all of Jerusalem and the larger settlement blocs in its hands. The new West Bank border will be that of the security fence, which will be erected, in its southern half, so as to place the great majority of settlers on Israel’s side of it.

6. It is urgent to implement this option as quickly as possible, because since it will not meet with Palestinian or Arab approval, its only hope of gaining a measure of international acceptance lies in the backing of America. The current administration in Washington is the friendliest that Israel has ever had or is ever likely to have; therefore, it is highly advisable to conclude this territorial realignment, to which President Bush and Secretary of State Rice have given their tacit approval, while they are still in office – that is, before the end of 2008.

Such an analysis is as hard headed and realistic as the Oslo Agreements were fuzzy and full of wishful thinking. It will take more than the wishful thinking of the more ideological settlers and their supporters to present a plausible alternative to it.

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