Mr Lieberman's arrival as defence minister, however, may mark a turning point.
In some ways, less is at stake than Mr Yaalon's hyperbolic warning suggests. For decades the secular generals have been in charge of an occupation that has crushed the rights of Palestinians and caged them into ever-smaller holding pens. These generals have been just as cruel as the religious officers replacing them.
Nonetheless, the reverberations of this quiet revolution should not be ignored.
The old elites have lived off the fat of the land in the kibbutz, Israel's spacious farming communities built on the ruins of hundreds of Palestinian villages ethnically cleansed in 1948.
After the 1967 war, the kibbutz-generals happily exported the same model of industrial-scale theft of Palestinian land to the occupied territories.
But their security obsessions were ultimately rooted in Israel, where they fear having to account for the crimes of 1948 from which they profited. Their abiding nightmare is a right of return to Israel of the lands' original owners -- Palestinian refugees today numbering in the millions.
The religious camp's priorities are different. The lands they defend most passionately are not in Israel but in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. That is where many live and where the holy places that sanctify their territorial greed are located.
The spread of this zealotry into the army has made its more liberal elements deeply uncomfortable. In recent years, small numbers of whistleblowers have emerged, from military intelligence unit 8200 through to a group called Breaking the Silence.
The recent video of an execution of a badly wounded Palestinian by army medic Elor Azaria -- and the outpouring of public support in Israel for him -- has only intensified these tensions. This month the army's deputy head, Yair Golan, compared Israel to Nazi Germany. Mr Lieberman, meanwhile, is Azaria's most vocal supporter.
The goal of the religious nationalists is undisguised: to remove the last restraints on the occupation, and build a glorious, divinely ordained Greater Israel over an obliterated Palestinian society.
That means no hope of a peaceful resolution of Israel's conflict with the Palestinians -- unless it is preceded by a tumultuous civil war between Israel's secular and religious Jews.
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