But Facebook was not really the point for Erdan, or for Shaked. It was just the last in a long line of bogeymen and red herrings used by the Israeli right to cover a glaring, painful truth: They have no idea what to do. If anything, the Facebook spin proves that they don’t have much to offer but talk.

Also, that they’ll pretty much say anything if it means they can avoid talking about the ultimate reason that makes Palestinian teenagers grab a knife, a screwdriver or a gun and go out to kill: the everyday reality of military occupation in the West Bank.

So why is it that, while free at last to pursue their ideology, right-wing Israeli cabinetministers choose not to advocate for extreme measures, but prefer to go after a Zuckerberg and his terror incubator in Palo Alto? Well, for one, attacking Zuckerberg is far easier than really delving into the complexities of why teenagers are now butchering each other, and also translates far better electorally. Also, it’s much easier to look elsewhere for enemies than to admit that it’s impossible to beat terror without acknowledging the worsening reality of the occupation and its effects.

With the Facebook spin, the Israeli right’s denial has reached comic levels of ridiculousness. The right wing is officially out of excuses and parties to blame for its failure to provide Israelis with security. It cannot blame the left anymore, since the left is pretty much eviscerated, so it has moved to social media.

For nearly two years before the outbreak of the “lone-wolf intifada,” Israeli defense officials warned repeatedly that absent a political horizon for the Palestinians and a significant change in policy toward Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority, we were headed for an explosion.

No one could offer specifics about the nature of the upcoming conflict or how violent it would be. But between 2013 and 2015, there was a consensus among the Shin Bet, the military Intelligence brass, the Central Command, the coordinator of government activities in the territories and anyone with anything to do with the Palestinian arena that this was where things were headed. These warnings were issued time and time again — and time and time again the decision-makers ignored them. We Arab affairs reporters who were in the territories and encountered the Palestinians daily saw the black cloud looming over the West Bank. The writing was on the wall, whether the wall was inside a refugee camp, a village, city, or on Facebook.

And then it began: the “outbreak” (or hiba in Arabic), the “Al-Quds Intifada,” the “wave of terrorism,” the “lone-wolf intifada” — all these terms that attempted to describe the unfathomable phenomenon of hundreds of young men and women trying to kill Jews with knives, cars, and, of course, improvised rifles — even if it meant dying themselves.

The response of Israeli decision-makers was not very surprising, since they had disregarded all the warnings they’d gotten of the approaching explosion. Ignoring the warnings not to play with fire on the Temple Mount, they had outdone themselves by seeing fit to allow a prominent government minister to go up to the Temple Mount on the eve of Rosh Hashanah and allow a deputy minister to marry in the complex.