As I write this column on Monday morning in Israel, the balloting has just begun in the Central Committee of the Likud to decide whether to move up from next April to November the primary that will elect the party’s next leader and prime-ministerial candidate, as has been proposed by the opponents of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, led by Benjamin Netanyahu. By the time you read this, the results will be known and – if the verdict has gone against Mr. Sharon – the Likud may be on the brink of splitting in two.

Whatever the results are, though, I feel, while waiting for them, less curiosity than anger: at Benjamin Netanyahu, at Ariel Sharon, and at the Likud.

Mr. Netanyahu does not deserve to be the Likud’s leader or Israel’s prime minister. Even if one were ready to forgive him his many blunders and improprieties in the past, his political behavior since Prime Minister Sharon first announced his Gaza disengagement plan has been disgraceful. Lacking both the honesty that would have compelled him to support the plan and the courage that would have enabled him to oppose it, he prevaricated for over a year, first voting for it repeatedly in the cabinet while doing nothing to help the prime minister promote it and then coming out against it at the last moment, when he knew he could no longer do anything to stop it.

Mr. Netanyahu was an excellent minister of finance until his resignation a month ago and it is too bad he didn’t stay at his post. As it is, he is responsible more than anyone else for the political mess that Israel is in now. In his heart, he has always known that withdrawing from the Gaza Strip was the right thing to do – in fact, he has said publicly more than once that his objection to evacuating Jewish settlements from there was not one of principle but of tactics, since this should have been done not unilaterally but in negotiations with the Palestinian Authority that would have given Israel a quid pro quo.

Yet this is the purest hypocrisy. Mr. Netanyahu knows that his political positions, just like the prime minister’s but even more so, leave him with nothing substantial to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority about. What negotiations could he have been thinking of? His only thought was how to take Ariel Sharon’s job away from him – and so, knowing that disengagement was popular in the general public but not in the Likud, and not wanting to be blamed for either its failure or its success, he sat on the fence while withholding the backing that would have made it possible for the prime minister to implement it while holding the Likud together.

But Ariel Sharon’s conduct has not been a great deal better. From the moment his disengagement plan was set in motion, he behaved toward both the citizens of Israel and the members of his own party like the former general that he is, thinking it sufficient to issue orders without bothering to explain the reasoning behind them. Although the withdrawal from Gaza was a smart move, the prime minister acted as if he expected its wisdom to go unchallenged simply because it came from him.

It was, together with Mr. Netanyahu’s duplicity, this arrogance on the prime minister’s part, which left even senior politicians in the Likud reduced to guessing what his real thinking was, that cost the prime minister the May 2004 Likud referendum with which all his current political troubles started – and it is this arrogance that had continued to plague him to this day. Anyone watching him at the Likud Central Committee on Sunday, doing everything he could – laughing at the speakers who attacked him, joking with those around him as they spoke, staring into space as if listening to distant music – to demonstrate his indifference to the opinions of others, can easily understand why he has generated such hostility in his own party.

But what a party he is stuck with! Anyone watching it could sympathize with Mr. Sharon’s sneers. Even before someone sabotaged the electricity on Sunday night just as the prime minister was about to deliver the concluding speech, forcing him twice to put away the microphone and step down from the podium without uttering a word, the Likud convention, like many of its kind before, was more like a rowdy brawl than a political discussion. Booing and shouting down one’s opponents was the main form of listening to them, and neither side showed any more consideration than did the other.

The break-up of the Likud will usher in a period of political instability for Israel greater than any it has known before. In the short run, if Mr. Sharon leaves the party to found a new center grouping of his own, he may be able to remain in power for a few more years – something which is certainly preferable to the return of Mr. Netanyahu. But he will soon be 78 years old and a few more years is the most he has. With the Labor Party in a long process of structural decline, and the Likud smashed to pieces, Israel will find itself for the first time in its history without a single strong, widely-based political party. This is a prescription for political confusion and anarchy.

So one is angry at the Likud’s politicians, too, for letting this come to pass. Even those of them who spoke eloquently on Sunday night in behalf of party unity, have woken up too late to the fact that they have national responsibilities that go beyond party cronyism and infighting. Even more than Israeli democracy needs strong leaders, it needs strong political parties, and it does not look like this is what it is about to get.

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