Yet some maintain that the Gaza withdrawal was the only viable path forward. Chemi Shalev, a columnist in the daily newspaper Haaretz, argues that the disengagement “was the very essence of those times. Israelis longed to rid themselves of terrorist bombings and to discard their despair of a failed peace process. Lacking partners, they preferred to do it themselves.”

Shalev draws an analogy with the withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 after 18 years of military occupation, which was also at first supported, then criticised. The biggest achievement of the Gaza withdrawal, says a former high-ranking Israeli government source who played a key role during the disengagement, is that it was executed promptly, without a single casualty, and set a solid precedent for further withdrawals. Alongside the 21 Gaza settlements, four West Bank settlements were also evacuated. Ariel Sharon “was convinced it was the right thing to do and to continue with [withdrawal] in the West Bank.”

The parameters of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are well-known, and were most recently outlined in detail during bilateral negotiations in 2008. The peace plan, as championed by former prime minister Ehud Olmert, would see the establishment of a non-contiguous Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, linked by a land corridor, with land swaps and an internationalisation of the Old City of Jerusalem. And yet, a decade on from the Gaza retreat, further withdrawals from the West Bank do not appear to be on the Israeli government’s agenda.

Since 2005, aside from a brief hiatus in 2009 following pressure from the US, settlement expansion has continued almost unabated. A rebellion is on the horizon, warn many in Israel — not a third intifada, but rather an uprising of Israeli settlers against their country’s secular and democratic forces. Events over the past ten years demonstrate time and again the swift rise of the violent hilltop settlers.

The Gaza withdrawal was completed peacefully and even ahead of schedule. But it may have been the last time settlements will be evacuated in such a manner and on such a large scale.

The withdrawal was completed on September 12, 2005. Just six months later, in February 2006, the evacuation of nine empty homes in Amona, an outpost determined as being illegal by Israel’s Supreme Court, descended into a bloodbath. More than 200 people were injured, including many policemen and two Israeli parliamentarians. Ten thousand officers from the police, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and security services were unable to contain the uprising. Today, Amona still stands, now the biggest Jewish illegal outpost in the Palestinian Territories — a symbol of settler defiance in the face of Israeli law.

As recently as July this year, the government attempted to implement a Supreme Court ruling and take down two illegally built structures in the settlement of Beit El — itself considered illegal under international, though not Israeli, law. Rather than support the rule of law, the pro-settler Israeli parliamentarian Moti Yogev called for the bulldozing of the Supreme Court. Hundreds of protesters violently clashed with the police and security forces. One of the leaders of the people trying to prevent the police from approaching the structures was an elected Knesset member, Oren Hazan, from prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own party.