“The city that never stops” is a slogan that the municipality of Tel Aviv features on signs throughout the city. Perhaps Israel should advertise itself as “the country that never stops.” Scarcely is the disengagement from Gaza over when everyone is already talking about dramatic developments on the political front – internecine warfare in the Likud, anarchy in Labor, the likelihood of new elections in late 2005 or early 2006, and above all, the so-called “Big Bang” that will blow Israeli politics wide apart: The prospect that Ariel Sharon will walk out of the Likud, taking many of its Knesset members and supporters with him, and make common cause with Shimon Peres and other breakaways from Labor to form a new centrist party with ruling ambitions.

It may or may not happen. But although the politicians will continue to make headlines with their infighting, the next year or two in Israel are more likely to witness the “Big Freeze.” By that I mean that while parties and their leaders may change, nothing much else will. The country that has just gone through disengagement and the long run-up to it is presently exhausted. More than anything, it needs to rest and digest what has happened to it – and rest it will, even if it has to do so in a politically frenzied atmosphere.

Indeed, it is precisely the completion of disengagement that has set the political free-for-all going. As long as disengagement was still under way, Ariel Sharon was Mr. Indispensable. (Some of his more cynical critics had argued all along that the main purpose of his disengagement plan was to make himself that.) Disengagement was from the start his baby. It was clear that no one but he could see it through – and even some of its opponents would have privately admitted that a crash caused by its last-minute derailing would have been far worse for Israel than its successful execution.

Yet now that disengagement has been carried out, Mr. Sharon seems dispensable indeed. To be sure, he would not be if he intended to or were able to follow up on the evacuation of Jewish settlements from Gaza with the second and larger evacuation from the West Bank that the logic of Gaza disengagement always pointed to. However, it is clear that, after the trauma of the last few weeks, this cannot be on his near- or even middle-term agenda. Just as no doctor would expect a patient to go through a second major operation before he has recovered from the first one, no Israeli prime minister is about to ask the country to subject itself in the immediate future to Disengagement II. If Mr. Sharon loses to Benjamin Netanyahu in the Likud primaries that will be held within the next few months, therefore, this will not be only because the Likud rank and file has been aching to get back at him for ignoring its anti-disengagement vote in last year’s party referendum that he himself called for. It is also because it senses that, at the age of 77, Mr. Sharon, if re-elected to the prime-minister’s post, would be a lame duck from the day he took office.

The five years in which Ariel Sharon led the country up till now will always be remembered for three great achievements: the crushing of the intifada that was inherited from Ehud Barak, the disengagement from Gaza, and an important series of economic reforms that brought Israel out of a severe recession and put it on the road to renewed growth. Yet the first and second of these is behind him, and the third he owed entirely to the initiative of his finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is now fighting to replace him. There is little new left for him to do.

Mr. Netanyahu, too, is unlikely to institute any radical new policies if, nominated by the Likud, he wins the coming elections. He will continue with his economic reforms, although at a slower pace, and seek to avoid further concessions to the Palestinians while living off the capital of the Gaza disengagement that he was against. As for Shimon Peres, or whoever else wins the Labor nomination, don’t expect, in the unlikely eventuality that Labor is the winner in the next election, anything very original from him either. Although he might like to press ahead with the peace process, he will not have, between the Palestinians and the Likud, enough leeway to do so. And although he might like to go back to the welfare-state economics that the Netanyahu reforms did away with, their success will not let him do that, either.

And the Big Bang? Even if it takes place, it’s more likely to end with a whimper. New centrist parties in Israel have a long history of coming and going. Although they often start off with grand fanfares and glamorous lists of candidates, they generally founder quickly enough, done in by poor organizational infrastructure and squabbling among their political prima donnas. It is doubtful whether Ariel Sharon could get himself elected prime minister at the head of such a party, and even more doubtful if he could accomplish very much were he to do so.

Since 1967, Israel’s leaders have consistently alternated between brief periods of bold activity, often involving important breakthroughs, and longer ones of recuperation and retrenchment. Mr. Sharon has just concluded a bold move. We shouldn’t hold our breaths waiting for the next one.

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