Sharon will sweep away his enemies - his Likud party has committed political suicide by defying the Israeli leader, says Dr Emanuele Ottolenghi
Ariel Sharon may have lost Wednesday's vote on Likud's central committee over whether Labour should join Israel's ruling coalition. Ultimately though, either the rebels bow to the prime minister's stronger will, or the right-wing Likud party will lose power and also lose the settlements in the occupied territories that Sharon's opponents are trying so hard to preserve. Likud might even lose Sharon himself.
Settlements and Sharon have been entwined for decades. But no more. As his showdown with his party proves, Sharon is serious about disengaging from Gaza and part of the West Bank.
Now, for the third time in three years, his party has rebuffed him on a major policy issue. For Sharon, the party is becoming a nuisance, not an asset. If the rebels keep winning, Likud may break up; and the pressure for Sharon to create a new alliance with the centre, or even a new party, may become unstoppable.
Abroad, Sharon is considered a hardline ideologue of Greater Israel. The reality is different. Although Sharon is the architect of settlements and of the Likud party - which he helped establish in 1973 - his background is not in the old Israeli revisionist right, as are those of a number of the key rebels.
In fact, Sharon's roots lie with the revisionists' old ideological enemies: the hawkish, but pragmatic tradition of Israel's Labour movement.
His commitment to settlements, as well as to Likud, was always about security: a means to achieve a thriving Israel, safe in a hostile Middle East for generations to come. His quest for secure borders certainly does not match Palestinian aspirations; but he is not driven by a dogmatic and uncompromising attachment to the land.
In 1982, as minister of defence, Sharon ordered the bulldozers to level Yamit, the last Israeli settlement in Sinai, to fulfil Israel's obligations under the Camp David accords with Egypt.
It took him time to become persuaded of the agreement's enduring nature. But once he embraced it, no amount of pressure from the settlers could budge him.
It is the same with his commitment to disengagement and national unity: Sharon has made up his mind. A Likud standing in the way might soon become an impediment to be removed. And so Likud's central committee may come to regret having defeated and humiliated Sharon yet again.
The rebels thrive on the illusion that the sharp reduction in terror attacks plays in their favour. They are wrong: the public, including most Likud voters, supports Sharon precisely because he wants out of Gaza. Over 60 per cent support disengagement and a national unity government that includes Labour; 61 per cent feel secure in their daily lives and approve of Sharon's security policies.
But a reduction of terror is not enough: Israelis want a political horizon, not a dead-end. Sharon, for his part, has learned two lessons in his long political career: never fight a war with a nation divided and Labour in opposition, or without American support. Today, he has a nation largely united behind him, and firm US backing. He is not going to let Likud's hard-liners undermine either by preventing Labour from joining him.
The Likud party loves self-inflicted pain: Wednesday's vote was an act of political suicide.
But Sharon is not Likud, and Likud is not Sharon. Before the year's end, expect a showdown.
Either Sharon will have relegated his opponents to irrelevance, or he will have relegated Likud to history.
The Likud rebels' opposition to his disengagement plan is a rearguard battle of a defeated ideology against the political realism of a right-wing leader who understands the difference between ideological dreams and the current political reality.
Sharon's defeat may give his opponents an ephemeral victory but, ultimately, Israel's choices today are not between a two-state solution and the vision of a Greater Israel.
They are between Sharon's plan and Yossi Beilin's Geneva accords, which would take Israel back to its 1967 borders and, from Likud's perspective, open the way to the large-scale return of Palestinian refugees.
In 1998, Israel's nationalist right punished prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's double "sin" of withdrawing from most of the West Bank town of Hebron and signing the Wye River agreements with Yasser Arafat by toppling him - only to get a Labour government.
Today's rebels face a similar choice: neutralising Sharon's plan will only bring Israel's defeated left back to power. Theirs is the fate of ideologues: they might rule the central committee, but they have lost the people. Sharon knows that. That's why his defeat is only temporary.
Dr Emanuele Ottolenghi teaches Israeli politics at Oxford University
www.emanueleottolenghi.com