With the backing of the Israeli public, President Bush and to a lesser extent the Israeli Cabinet, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has ensured that there will be a withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The issues from now on are what scale the pullout will take, what is to become of the West Bank and what price Sharon will exact for cooperating with him.

To appease his Cabinet, Sharon was forced to water down the withdrawal more than once. At the same time he needed to get the very principle of disengagement accepted. This he did, but because getting the principle accepted was arduous, implementation in anything like its original form is less than likely. Sharon may be able with a wave of his hand to evacuate settlers from minor settlements in Gaza — the first stage of the revised plan. But the chances of a Likud-led government evacuating the much larger settlements, considering that the Cabinet will vote beforehand on each and every pullout, looks small. The resistance to this by the settlers would be formidable, perhaps triggering a new government crisis, perhaps new elections, and again restructuring the plan beyond what it was originally intended to achieve.

The dropping of the bribery charges against Sharon freed him to begin talks with the left-wing Labor Party to bring it into a broad-based coalition. Labor supports his disengagement plan, and after Sharon threw the far-right National Union Party out of his government to engineer a majority in the Cabinet vote, Labor could step in to provide him a safety net in the Knesset to carry through the withdrawal.

But Sharon is in no hurry to ally himself with the party — hence the concessions he made on the pullout.

Sharon also faces a domestic political showdown which is likely to be tough. Twelve of the 40 Likud members of Parliament are not only opposed to the disengagement but also to Labor joining the government, preferring what they call an ideological coalition rather than a centrist one. Their immediate aim is to increase their numbers so as to block any Likud majority approving Labor’s entry. Sharon’s immediate aim is to cut them down to size.

But buoyed by his escape from indictment and polls that back him, the odds are Sharon will win this intra-party contest. Most analysts see him heading a minority government until the parliamentary summer recess in August, with autumn the most likely time for a new national unity government.

In the meantime, Sharon looks set to consolidate Israel’s hold on the West Bank. Israel’s Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz has requested new plans for increased construction in three vast West Bank settlement blocs that he and Sharon want to annex to Israel. Orders have also been issued to expropriate 4,500 acres of Palestinian land to extend the latest segment of the West Bank wall of separation.

Another huge land grab in the West Bank amply proves, if more proof was needed, that the planned Gaza withdrawal will be neither comprehensive nor complete.