A survey conducted in Gaza this September showed that a majority of its residents would prefer Fatah to Hamas if elections were held. Early this month President Mahmoud Abbas spoke again of a two state solution and even hinted at compromising on the right of return.

What could Israel do in light of this but start a war? Israel can’t deal with peace. It has become a war machine, and I’m not referring only to its over-militant decision makers and those who take their orders. Decades of media bias and dogmatic education managed to turn its citizens into a blinded mob that always support violence: today’s Haaretz poll shows 84 percent back the current offensive. A foreign television crew with which I work interviewed passersby today on the situation in Gaza. “We know they die by the score there,” one Tel Aviv resident told the camera, “It’s not that we don’t know. We just don’t care.”

Of course Palestinians can be extremely militant and violent. You would be too, after decades of enslavement, and if you believe you could overcome such wrath, well then, you’d be like the majority of Palestinians. As for Hamas, I am not fond of them one bit — notice this piece begins with my faith in a survey that showed it weakening. The thing is, it is (or was, until recent events) weakening.

Meanwhile, the Israeli Right is only becoming more powerful. True, it lies, diverts attention, misinforms and uses fear-mongering to gain power and support. The media effectively dehumanizes Palestinians and fosters our sense of victimhood, and the media is run by powerful people with links to Jerusalem high brass, but the simple people have heads on their shoulders and hearts in their chests. They too share responsibility. We have all been failed by the Israelis in recent days, again, all of us – the world, the Israeli Left, and especially the Palestinians.

The Israeli Left does still exist, and bravely struggles in the face of mounting de-legitimization, but it may finally be declared too small to count. Now that Labor leader Shelly Yachimovitch expressed full support for Netanyahu and Barak’s actions, only the tiny Meretz party (with three seats in the 120 seat Knesset) and the mixed Hadash party (only a minority of whose voters are Jewish) remain to offer an alternative. Both have openly opposed the military offensive.

In Jewish tradition, a dairy dish into which a piece of meat fell remains kosher, so long as that piece of meat is less than sixty times the size of the full dish. It is “batel b’shishim” – “cancelled out by sixty.” The community of Israelis who seek justice, life and human rights isn’t yet the sixtieth part of this country’s population, but alas, we don’t count for much. I would advise those who are unsure of how to feel about the current events not to decide their opinion based on our existence and our actions. Israel does not deserve to have us as a fig leaf.

We Israelis deserve the eternal war we live in. We deserve our murderous government, which is now sailing to the safe port of reelection on a river of Gazan (and some Israeli) blood. We deserve all that for saying yes to death again and again, but the Palestinians, who suffer of the same Bibi’s whims, don’t. They actually reach out for peace, both on the popular level and in formal speeches. Well, maybe not anymore. Not at the moment, not even if the ceasefire does come tonight. Yet another opportunity massacred.

Can we change? Should we never say die? Should I ask all of you, my readers around the world, to put pressure on us, to deny us business and culture so that we are forced to evolve? I don’t know anymore. Do so but without great expectations. It’s up to world leaders to make the difference here, and they need to treat us with enormous toughness, which they hardly seem inclined to show. So it remains: there is no way out, there was, but there isn’t now. A good night to everybody from Tel Aviv, and may the memory of the victims be blessed.

Click here for more +972 coverage on the Israel-Gaza conflict.

The assassination of Ahmad Jabari, the architect of both the recent Gilad Shalit prisoner swap and, more importantly, the détente that prevailed between Israel and Hamas for the past several years, is an uncharacteristically high-risk gamble by the Netanyahu and Barak duo. It’s uncharacteristic not only because Netanyahu, in the past, has been extremely careful not to upset the apple cart and has repeatedly dialed up the violence in the Gaza Strip and dialed it down again, but also because this round was already being calmed down via an Egypt-brokered ceasefire when the assassination got the go-ahead.

My own hunch, and that of several Israeli observers, is that Barak is the prime mover behind this recent escalation. His has been a consistent voice for stronger Israeli military action in previous rounds of escalation in Gaza, and he stands more to gain from a large-scale military operation. Netanyahu is winning the elections with one hand tied behind his back; Barak and his splinter Independence Party, by contrast, have barely been scratching the electoral barrier. Appearing as a decisive, wily and sophisticated military mind next to a wallowing Netanyahu can only do Barak that much good, and Israeli Twitterati have already replaced “Pillar of Defense” the cringe-inducing, Freud-evoking codename for the operation with “Independence War.”

The smug announcement was further drilled home by a press release from the Prime Minister’s Office, which gushed at the prime minister surpassing the 200,000 “likes” bar, noted opponents trail “far behind” and crowned the prime minister’s Facebook page as an instrument “linking the people and the leader.” The website of Labor leader Shelly Yachimovich (with a self-confessedly humble 20,000 plus ‘”likes”) quickly shot back with the following observation from the head of its Internet volunteer teams, Amichai Saragovi:

Some time ago us in the Internet team began talking about how something in Netanyahu’s growing Facebook clout doesn’t make sense, especially in a country as small as Israel. A quick search via Facebook [through the advertisement feature - D.R.] three weeks ago found, much to our astonishment, that only 17 percent of Netanyahu’s Facebook fans are Israeli. 52 percent hail from the United States, and, most amusingly, some 3 percent, approximately 5,000 Bibi fans (more than his fans in the United Kingdom, France, Canada and Mexico combined) come from Indonesia. Indonesia, as it is commonly known, is the largest Muslim country in the world, with which we have no diplomatic relations, and I somehow find it difficult to believe the objectively joyous news that our prime minister has been capturing Indonesian hearts and minds… by comparison, some 90 percent of Shelly’s 20,400 fans are Israeli, with the remaining ten percent spread across different countries, a pattern common for such fan pages.

Saragovi then takes the gloves off and proceeds to accuse Netanyahu of deliberately misleading the public.

The leader, according to his own press release, communicates with some 200,000 of his compatriots via Facebook. In truth, he’s communicating with some 30,000 of them, not much more than the actual number of fans on Shelly’s page… there’s also the feeling the numbers have been bloated artificially.

Screenshot of the searches can be found at the bottom of Saragovi’s post. It should be noted that Netanyahu has been advertising his page relentlessly in the last few months – even if none of the “likes” on his page have been purchased, as activists were quick to suggest, the financial investment in the page is a considerable one.

The Prime Minister’s Office is yet to respond to the stats.