Israel is in bad trouble over Prime Minister Sharon’s Gaza disengagement plan. Civil war there won’t be, despite the dark threats of the settler movement. But severe civil strife there already is, and civil paralysis is a distinct possibility.

For this one can blame, first of all, the prime minister’s own Likud Party, few of whose leading figures have supported him strongly on disengagement or paid more than lip service to quelling the rank-and-file opposition to it that expressed itself in Mr. Sharon’s resounding defeat in an intra-party referendum last May. Had these leaders, especially Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, fought for Mr. Sharon, he could have carried the referendum and rallied the Likud behind him.

Instead, the prime minister now commands a party split in two on whose parliamentary support he cannot count in putting disengagement through. He can perhaps, with the help of the left, still win the Knesset’s needed approval of his plan, but a right-of-center prime minister who depends on the left to help him evacuate Jewish settlements from part of “the land of Israel” will face an Israel nearly as badly split as the country was on the eve of the Rabin assassination. Mr. Sharon’s whole advantage in terms of ceding territory was his reputed ability to win over the right for such a step, as Menachem Begin did in withdrawing from Sinai. If he can’t do this, Israel is back to the bitter divisiveness of 1995.

But the prime minister also has himself to blame. In the first place, his dithering over the past year about evacuating the unauthorized West Bank outposts that he has promised the Israeli public and the American government to remove has enormously encouraged the settler movement in its belief that it has the power to prevent settler evacuation of any kind. After one or two feeble attempts at clearing a few of the outposts, in which too few troops were swamped by thousands of demonstrators whom they were not authorized to be sufficiently tough with, Mr. Sharon gave up the effort, sending the settlers the clear message that if they can prevent the removal of a few hilltop shacks from anywhere in the West Bank, they can certainly prevent the removal of whole Jewish villages from Gaza.

And Mr. Sharon has blundered even more badly by failing to present his disengagement plan cogently, consistently, or forcefully to the Israeli public. The logic behind disengagement is overwhelming: It is that, if Israel does not withdraw, not only from Gaza, but from most of the West Bank, its Jews will within a few years become a minority, or – if it withdraws only from Gaza – a narrow and rapidly shrinking majority in their own country. The extraordinarily high Palestinian birthrate, which is nearly double the Israeli one, ensures that this will happen.

This is why more and more Palestinians, the latest of whom is the PLO’s legal adviser Michael Tarzi in a recent New York Times op-ed, have begun to drop the demand for a Palestinian state in favor of a single binational, “democratic” Jewish-Arab state. Such Palestinians know well what the settlers and their supporters blindly refuse to realize – namely, that an Israel with more Arabs than Jews in it is an Israel in which, eventually, there will be no or almost no Jews left at all. The notion that, given their political and cultural differences and history of enmity, Jews and Arabs can live together in a democratic state any more successfully than Serbs and Bosnians, or Hutu and Tutsis, is absurd; the notion that an Israel in which Jews are a minority can go on forever ruling an Arab majority deprived of democratic rights as in the old South Africa, is no less so.

Yet Mr. Sharon, fearful of losing what support on the right he still has, has deliberately refrained from citing the demographic facts or admitting that disengagement in Gaza must be followed by disengagement in the West Bank. On the contrary: He has repeatedly dropped broad hints, most recently by means of a carefully planned interview given by his former personal adviser Dov Weissglass, that disengagement in Gaza will make possible the indefinite retention of the whole West Bank. Not only is this false, it actually strengthens the hands of disengagement’s opponents, who quite rightly point out that a Gaza withdrawal that is followed by nothing more solves nothing while creating numerous risks and problems.

It is hard to argue with this, which is why Mr. Sharon’s plan has not aroused any great enthusiasm even on the left, which called for getting out of Gaza long before him. Indeed, the main reason that the prime minister has resisted the growingly popular idea of staging a national referendum on disengagement is that, although the polls show Israelis favoring his plan by a large margin, he fears that this majority will not turn out in sufficient numbers at the polls to outvote the militant and well-disciplined anti-disengagement forces.

The result of all this is growing political chaos. It is not clear whether, with so many defections from his own camp, Mr. Sharon can win the Knesset vote on disengagement scheduled for October 25; it is not clear whether, even if he wins it, he will be able to implement the plan itself; it is not clear whether, if he loses it, he can call for new elections, since it is far from certain that he will be able to get himself renominated by his own party, half of which is now in open rebellion against him.

All of this might have been avoided had Mr. Sharon had the political courage to speak the truth. Perhaps it still isn’t too late. So far he has only managed to confuse everybody, leaving the opponents of disengagement convinced more than ever that he is wrong and its supporters less certain than ever that he is right.

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