After hours spent battling hundreds of local youths, the Israeli forces withdrew from the main junction leading into Um al-Fahm in the mid-afternoon, concluding their presence was merely inciting further violence.
A mob of angry youngsters, fuelled by rumours that one of their number had died from wounds sustained earlier, immediately overran the intersection, tearing up everything in their path, including the traffic lights.
Similar scenes were being repeated all over the nearby area. And what was most significant about them was the fact that Um al-Fahm and its surrounding towns and villages are not part of the West Bank. They are not occupied territory. They are part of sovereign Israel, northern Israel, and the rioting hundreds were Israeli citizens.
The clashes that turned Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip into a war-zone at the weekend were the worst this region has seen in four years. But although numerically the 1996 gunbattles may be considered more serious - 70 people were killed then, in violence sparked by the secretive opening by Israel of a new exit to an archaeological tunnel adjacent to the ultra-sensitive Temple Mount - the latest round of Israeli-Arab street fighting is actually more widespread and potentially far more dramatic.
For one thing, it has involved Israel's million-strong Arab minority more deeply than did that fighting four years ago.
Palestinian radio has been characterising the clashes as "the battle for Jerusalem," and Israel's Muslims are as attached to the mosques atop the Temple Mount - the area they refer to as the Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary - as are their cousins on the far side of the Israeli-West Bank and Israeli-Gaza borders. So Israel's Arab leaders called a general strike yesterday, and riots erupted through much of northern Galilee, pitching Israeli police and paramilitary border police against youths throwing stones and petrol bombs and, in some cases, firing automatic weapons.
For years, Israeli Arab leaders have urged the Jewish majority to end its occupation of Palestinian territory and to address their own internal grievances - the funding inequalities that see Israeli Arab children studying in neglected school buildings, their local councils cash-starved. Because those complaints have gone unaddressed, the call to protest yesterday fell on fertile ground.
The second significant difference from 1996 is that Israel, then, was governed by rightwinger Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, who was determined to minimise territorial concessions to the Palestinians, opposed independent Palestinian statehood and had no intention of conceding control of any part of Jerusalem to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. But Mr Netanyahu was replaced by the relatively moderate Mr Ehud Barak, who is prepared to withdraw from almost all occupied territory, supports an agreement that would yield an independent Palestine, and has been trying in the last few weeks to agree terms with Mr Arafat on the sharing of Jerusalem.
The Palestinian leadership is adamant that this weekend's riots have been "spontaneous" - their people's passionate, furious response to the sight of Israeli hardliner Mr Ariel Sharon touring the Temple Mount last Thursday. Israel is equally adamant the protests are being "orchestrated" by Mr Arafat's henchmen.
Wherever the truth lies, dozens more Palestinian families are now mourning "martyrs." Hundreds more Palestinians are nursing wounds. And many thousands of Israelis are doubtless asking themselves whether, in this climate, they should go on supporting a government that has championed the peace process, or revert to a rightwing opposition that sees no future in dialogue with Mr Arafat, opposes far-reaching compromise with him, and regards intermittent wars with the Palestinians as an interminable inevitability.