This week, Israelis voted with their eyes shut. This doesn't mean Israelis didn't know what they were doing. They knew full well. Indeed, the fact that they understood what they were doing was the main reason the election campaign was so lifeless and the voter turnout one of the lowest ever.
Rather, Israelis voted with their eyes shut figuratively and almost literally, too. They did this by, for the first time in decades, paying no attention to the Palestinians or to peace. They voted as if there were no Arabs in the Middle East.
The election issue, such as it was, was hitkansut, a Hebrew word which effectively means ‘disengagement.’ Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, successor to the incapacitated Ariel Sharon and leader of the new centrist Kadima party, used it as his winning slogan.
Hikansut, though, wasn't really an issue in the normal political sense because almost everyone agreed with the policy of disengagement - from the Palestinians, from the Arabs, and from any serious attempt to try to restart peace negotiations.
From Labour on the left to Likud on the right, and on the far right, the new Russian party Yisrael Beitenu, the only differences were about details of how to implement disengagement, such as how far out into the West Bank to push the separation ‘wall’ and how many small Jewish settlements to abandon.
Thus Yisraels Beitenu's leader Avigdor Lieberman, who advocates a form of ethnic cleansing to be applied to Israel's own Arab citizens, toned down his rhetoric during the election to appeal to more voters - successfully, since his party came from nowhere to win third place.
The electoral winner by a wide margin was not so much Olmert, who got far fewer seats than expected - 28 rather than the 40 to 45 suggested by the polls.
The real winner was hitkansut.
One reason it won so easily was that Palestinians have embraced their own form of hitkansut. They have done this by electing a Hamas government that refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist and that also refuses to give up its commitment to violence.
There is, though, a fundamental difference between the mutual disengagement now going on between both Palestinians and Israelis.
The Israelis have the power to do what they want. The Palestinians can only try to respond to whatever the Israelis do to them in pursuit of their own interests.
As a result of this election, Olmert now has an overwhelming mandate to continue with his policy of completing the separation barrier, of reducing to a minimum the entry of job-seeking Palestinians into Israel, of pulling back isolated Jewish settlements in the West Bank, of cutting up Palestine into enclaves in order to hold on to all large Jewish settlements there, and of keeping what's left encircled by holding onto the Jordan Valley.
What would be left for the Palestinians by all of this imposed disengagement would be an impoverished, ungovernable rump. In the phrase of the Washington-based Stratford Geopolitical Intelligence Report, it would mean ‘simply leav(ing) them to rot.’
Despite the low turnout and the lack of enthusiasm among voters for Olmert, the election itself thus was one of the most important in Israeli history.
It means the end of any peace process, even of any pretense of interest in the possibility of peace negotiations. Even Labour, the most dovish of the parties, campaigned almost exclusively on social and economic issues.
In the desert, the name of peace is now hitkansut.