Israel is no longer the same country it was a week ago. It’s just too early to say how it has changed.

Not that this past week’s evacuation of 21 Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip lived up to any of the gloom-and-doom predictions. On the contrary: To the relief of just about everyone, although to the surprise of few who were knowledgeable, there was almost no violence, let alone serious injury or death. The foolish prophecies of civil war or mass anarchy, made by those who never really understood Israeli society, did not remotely come to pass.

Indeed, even if the coming days’ evacuation of four more settlements in the northern West Bank proves to be more difficult, Israel has much to be proud of. The army and police units entrusted with the Gaza evacuation behaved magnificently, showing restraint, consideration, and even empathy for the settlers while at the same time carrying out orders without wavering. The televised scenes of thousands of men in uniform, many with tears in their eyes, sometimes hugging the very people they were evicting, sometimes stoically letting themselves be reviled and screamed at, are not easily forgettable.

And yet the settlers acquitted themselves well, too. Yes, some ranted and acted hysterically; who of us might not do the same if made, unjustly in our eyes, to give up the home we had built, the rooms our children had grown up in, the trees we had planted, the graves of the dead we had buried? In the end, the settlers vented their anger, and grieved, and left with their heads held high and their infants and Torah scrolls in their arms. Few of them were to be found among the young hotheads who took part in the week’s only pitched battle, a bloodless storming of a synagogue roof that looked like a spoof of ancient siege warfare.

A country that lives through its “civil wars” in this manner is a country that inspires much hope. It is a country whose citizens – once more refuting the widespread image of Israel as a hopelessly split country – are united by much more than divides them.

And yet the trauma has nonetheless been great – so great that it is not at the moment possible to venture an accurate assessment of it. As with all deep tremors that shake a society to its deepest foundations, it may take many months or even years to ascertain what seismic shifts have taken place, what has been destroyed and what must be rebuilt, what damage is repairable and what damage is not.

It might be asked why the trauma this time should have been so much greater than in 1981, when Israel evacuated the Sinai as part of its peace agreement with Egypt, and with it roughly the same number of settlers as the number that left the Gaza Strip this past week. 1981 left relatively few scars. Why should 2005 leave more?

But the evacuees from Sinai had lived there a relatively short time, few even as many as 10 years. Many of the Gaza settlements were 25 or 30 years old. Thirty years is nearly half a lifetime; for the many children and grandchildren born in these villages, it was a whole one.

The Sinai evacuees were indeed only evacuees. The Gaza ones are refugees. They are no less refugees than the Palestinian Arabs who were made to leave their homes in 1948. For someone born and raised in a place, what difference does it make if his ancestors settled there 30 years ago or 300? (In fact, many of the ’48 refugees belonged to Arab families that had only been in Palestine a generation or two themselves.)

Jewish history is of course full of refugees. Sometimes, to those who read about it, it seems to be nothing more than one long tale of columns of Jews leaving the homes they have lived in, with their infants and Torah scrolls in their arms. What many pro-disengagement Israelis suddenly realized this week with a kind of growing horror as they watched events unfold in the around-the-clock coverage on their TV screens was that, as cogent as the reasons for disengagement were, once again Jews had been turned into refugees for no other reason than that they were Jews. This time, however, they had been turned into them by a Jewish state.

I cannot speak at this point for other Israelis. It will take time, as I say, for us to sort out our reactions to the events of this past week and for us to communicate them to one another. At the moment, I can only speak for myself. And doing that I must say that – to my shocked surprise – I found these events emotionally intolerable. Although I was a supporter of disengagement in Gaza, I cannot imagine wanting to see Israel go through such a trauma again, much less one many times greater if not 8,000 Jews, but five or 10 times that number, have to be forcibly evacuated from the West Bank.

And yet a unilateral Israeli disengagement from Gaza, as I myself have argued in the pages of this newspaper, made sense only in the context of an eventual unilateral disengagement from most of the West Bank as well. If Israel cannot do the second of these things, what was the point of all the anguish of the first?

This is not a rhetorical question. I ask it because this past week has changed me, too.

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