“I want to state it clearly,” said Naftali Bennett, education minister and leader of the right-wing pro-settler party Jewish Home, “Ten years after the disengagement to the day, we are here so that things will look different. The answer to Palestinian terror is settlement, not cowardice.”

The same day that the Beit El structures were demolished, Netanyahu announced the construction of 300 new housing units in another part of the settlement. A further 504 housing units were approved in five settlements in annexed East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians envisage as their future capital.

Yuval Diskin, former director of Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service, warned in August: “Religious Zionism is on the way to taking over the state of Israel. We are witnessing a new situation of ‘two states for two peoples’. The ‘state of Judea’ is arising de facto, alongside the state of Israel. In the state of Judea, there are different guidelines, a different set of values. There are two justice systems — one for Jews (Israeli law) and one for Palestinians (security legislation).”

This is evident in the extent to which senior IDF officers increasingly employ religious terminology. During the 2014 Gaza conflict, the commander of the IDF’s Givati Brigade, Colonel Ofer Winter, issued a battle order of the day setting the fighting in an explicitly religious context: “O Lord, God of Israel, make our path successful as we are about to fight for the sake of your people Israel against an enemy who blasphemes your name.” The effect is such that Israeli soldiers are encouraged to see the fighting as a “holy war”. Sound familiar?

Such incidents are not unusual. In 2009, former chief military rabbi Avihai Rontzki said soldiers should forego democratic and legal processes when dealing with terror suspects. Instead, they should rely on the “wisdom of commanders and fighters” and “kill [the suspects] in their beds”.

Many predict that this, coupled with the spread of nationalistic religious Zionism within the ranks of the Israeli army, will make further territorial pull-outs virtually impossible.

“What Sharon did in 2005, using the army to evacuate 10,000 settlers from Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip, is going to be much more complicated if you have 33 to 40 per cent of junior officers coming from that religious background,” notes Amos Harel, a veteran military analyst for Haaretz.

“Who are they going to listen to — the prime minister and the officers or the rabbis?”

In 2004, Dov Weissglas, a key adviser to Ariel Sharon, dropped a bombshell when he told Haaretz that the Gaza withdrawal was actually intended to “freeze the peace process”. By evacuating Gaza and four West Bank settlements, “effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”