Civil war is being talked about seriously and openly in Israel over the vote on Mr Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw from Gaza, which was carried in the Knesset with opposition support last night.
That is a measure of how deeply the issue has divided opinion. Mr Sharon says the occupation is unsustainable - "we have no desire to permanently rule over millions of Palestinians who double their numbers every generation" - and that withdrawal would be a sign of Israel's good faith about a peace settlement.
Two-thirds of Israeli voters support him. But the hard right-wing settler movement and many members of his Likud party reject the plan in principle or say it betokens a weak withdrawal under Palestinian fire.
The key question now is whether the Knesset decision encourages Israeli leaders to realign towards a new peace settlement. Mr Sharon has surprised his opponents by sticking to the Gaza plan right through this year, despite its rejection in a Likud referendum last May.
He has rejected calls to have a national referendum on it - or an early general election, which, he says, would simply reproduce the existing political impasse. This leaves him with little option but to find new coalition partners.
The obvious alternative is to reopen coalition talks with the Labour party which foundered in August. Its leader, Mr Shimon Peres, believes it will be possible to link the Gaza withdrawal to a renewed effort to find a two-state solution.
The US election campaign this year has effectively frozen efforts to renew talks with the Palestinians. The international quartet made up of the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations put forward detailed plans and timetables for parallel progress towards a settlement last year.
Mr Sharon's success in convincing the Bush administration that his Gaza plan has merit gained him time to combine it with a brutal military campaign to wipe out resistance movements there. In fact, it has strengthened Hamas, which has been able to fill the political vacuum.
It is difficult to interpret Mr Sharon's precise motivations for the Gaza initiative. His close adviser, Mr Dov Weisglass, recently described it as removing "this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails...indefinitely from the agenda".
He said it "supplies the amount of formaldehyde necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians". That cynical posture makes sense so long as the quartet process is frozen.
But Mr Sharon presumably foresees new developments early next year after the US elections. Whoever wins will want to revive Israeli-Palestinian talks as part of a wider process in the Middle East, including Iraq, and in an effort to repair US relations with Europe.
This withdrawal would allow him take advantage of such new circumstances and deal with them from a stronger position. If he pulls it off a new perspective opens up next year. But unless a Gaza withdrawal is on a multilateral basis, not this unilateral initiative, hopes for peace will be stillborn.