The line was crossed during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014 and resulted in the recent wave of terror attacks. The public discourse surrounding Israeli Arabs has become violent, racist and dangerous.

The rift was created despite the low degree of involvement of Palestinian Israelis in the recent wave of terror. Out of the 75 terror attacks perpetrated during the month of October, only two assailants were Palestinian Israelis: Alaa Raed Ahmad Ziwad, who carried out a stabbing and vehicular attack Oct. 11 in Gan Shmuel, and Mohannad Khalil Salam al-Okbi, from the Bedouin community near Hura, who on Oct. 18 carried out an attack in Beersheba. Asra Zidan Abed, from Nazareth, to whom an Oct. 9 attack in Afula was initially attributed, suffers, it seems, from a mental disorder. An investigation revealed that she was waving a knife at security forces because she wanted to commit suicide.

In light of the dozens of terror attacks in recent weeks, the Jewish public suspects, and rightly so, that everyone is a potential threat and might pull out a knife or some other sharp implement to carry out a bloody attack. “Anyone with Arab or Middle Eastern facial features is being very careful,” a floor manager at a Jaffa restaurant that only employs Arabs told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. He pointed to a young man walking down the street wearing a T-shirt that read, “I’m an Iraqi Jew. Don’t shoot me.”

“That’s not funny,” he explained. “Jews from North African or Middle Eastern origins with those facial features put on shirts saying they are Jews so that nobody will mistake them for Arabs. There are shirts like this for Moroccan, Tunisian and Yemeni [Jews]. Look what’s become of us.”