Late on Monday night a Jewish mob set alight Yehuda Avazi, a well-known restaurant in Tel Aviv's working-class "Hatikvah" quarter, apparently because they believed Arabs were working as waiters there. Further north, in Or Akiva, a petrol-bomb smashed the window of an Arab doctor's surgery, and in Pardes Hannah, an Arab-owned travel agency and building supplies store were set ablaze.
As if the conflict with the Palestinians were not bad enough, Israel has also gone to battle with itself these past few days, prompting headlines predicting civil war in the more excitable tabloids, and a call for calm from Prime Minister Ehud Barak: "To the Jewish citizens," he urged, "refrain at all costs from injuring Arabs and their property. To Arab citizens, refrain from being led by an extreme majority."
Anger among Israeli Jews is only now bubbling to the surface - a reflection of the fact they are reading this conflict very differently from most outside observers. While much of the world may have been persuaded, by the sheer weight of Palestinian casualties, that Israel is using excessive force against low-level Palestinian violence, the overwhelming sense among Israeli Jews is that it is they who are under attack, by mobs of young Palestinians; they feel whipped into protest by a cynical leadership that has abandoned the negotiating table because not all its demands were being met.
A newspaper survey at the weekend showed close to 70 per cent of Israelis still favouring a peace process with the Palestinians. But only a small proportion blame themselves for its collapse. Writing in the Ha'aretz daily on Sunday, Gideon Levy urged Mr Barak to evacuate Netzarim and Kfar Darom - two isolated settlements in Gaza that have been the focus of much violence - and the 500 Jews who live in the centre of Hebron in the West Bank. "Why not do it before the next spillage of blood?" he asked. "We would show both ourselves and the other side that there is another way, not only through force."
But these are minority sentiments. Far more typical is the argument, expressed by columnist Nadav Shragai in the same newspaper, that Israel is the victim here, that in ceding territory it has merely cultivated a perception of weakness in Arab minds, and that it has been deluding itself about Mr Arafat's commitment to peace-making. "Mr Arafat," according to Mr Shragai, has been "playing us for fools." It is that attitude that has brought Jewish mobs out onto the street this week.
This leaves Mr Barak in a desperate position. Unloved internationally for his perceived brutal suppression of this Palestinian uprising, he is despised by the Israeli right as overly soft, and for having previously offered to share Jerusalem with Mr Arafat. Many of his own erstwhile supporters now either share the international view of him as a brute, or have lost faith in Mr Arafat. And since Mr Barak, until two weeks ago, was the most widely backed pro-peace politician in Israel, his fall from grace has deeply ominous implications for any future effort at negotiations, when the guns finally fall silent.