“It would be a mistake to conclude that Israelis aren’t interested in peace with the Palestinians based solely on the number of people that came here. This system of counting heads is anachronistic.” Knesset member Nitzan Horowitz of the Meretz Party said on Nov. 1, when journalists asked for his take on the number of people who attended the annual memorial for late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The conversation with Horowitz took place in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square. In the background, former President Shimon Peres was addressing a crowd of 12,000 people, who had come to attend the memorial demonstration. The reporters’ questions expressed a need to assess the state of Israel’s peace camp today. Does it even exist anymore, 19 years after those three shots were fired in the square assassinating Rabin, after the second intifada and after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent so many years in office? Was 12,000 too small a crowd, especially when compared to the hundreds of thousands who protested the cost of living in the summer of 2011?

Horowitz is right. In the age of new media, where so much of the public debate occurs online, counting heads at rallies and demonstrations is no longer the sole means of determining public positions and attitudes on any given topic. Wrong are the right-wing claims that the peace camp consists of just a few thousand “deluded individuals” still clinging to an idea whose validity has long expired. The most recent elections, held in January 2013 have proved that a significant part of the Israeli public supports an agreement with the Palestinians based on the two-state solution.

For years, the predominant assumption in Israel has been that the right bloc holds a majority in Israel. The 2013 elections challenged this assumption. Four Zionist center-left parties — Yesh Atid, Labor, Hatnua and Meretz — won a total of 46 seats, compared to the 43 seats won by those parties clearly identified with the right: the Likud, Yisrael Beitenu and HaBayit HaYehudi. Furthermore, it is worth noting that there is even a group of Likud supporters, which will support a peace agreement with “painful concessions,” in the spirit of Netanyahu’s 2009 Bar Ilan speech.