When Ms Na'ama Binyamin (16) steels her nerve to travel by bus these days, her first instinct is to assess the risk of a suicide bombing.
"I think: 'Where do I sit? At the front? In the middle? At the back?' And when I see someone who looks like an Arab, I get off," said Ms Binyamin, an Israeli student.
She summoned the courage yesterday to make the short trip from her home to recite a prayer for the dead at the shattered Sbarro restaurant in downtown Jerusalem, where a Palestinian suicide bomber blew up himself and 15 other people on Thursday.
"Usually, me and my friends ate here. Always. It's the most popular place I know. Now I stay at home," Ms Binyamin said at the pizza parlour, where Israelis were lingering to pray, light candles and survey the black-edged mourning posters pasted on the boarded exterior.
The attack and others like it in 10 months of a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation have forced many Israelis to rethink routines as they grasp for ways to deal with the threat posed by suicide bombers of random death in familiar places.
Attendances at cinemas, shops, restaurants and street markets drop sharply after each bombing. Many Israelis shop outside the busy hours, when they perceive the risk of attack to be greatest. They avoid town centres and regard unfamiliar faces with suspicion.
One woman yesterday hesitated before getting in a shared taxi with me, a Briton, believing me to be a Palestinian. "Even if the attacks are not on buses, people are afraid to go on the bus. It affects everything in Israel," said a spokeswoman for the Egged bus company. "On the whole, people go out less now, so they use buses less. You think twice before you go to the mall or the movies."
The militants struck again yesterday, this time in a restaurant in the northern town of Kiryat Motzin. The attack, claimed by the Islamic Jihad group, killed the suicide bomber and wounded 15 other people, according to police.
Dr Ilan Kutz, a psychiatrist and expert in acute stress reactions, said Israeli responses to such attacks ranged from normal survival instincts to denial and what he called a grim determination to carry on with life as normal.
"The thing which is most disturbing is not just the actual mayhem following each terrorist bombing but the fact that when people look at the big picture they don't see a way out of the situation," he said. "It's like laboratory animals. If you put them in a labyrinth and don't provide a way out of it, they become demoralised."
The Sbarro attack, claimed by the Islamic militant group Hamas, was especially unnerving because of its timing and location - lunchtime at the intersection of Jerusalem's two busiest commercial streets - as well as the fatalities.
Most of the dead were women and children. "There was a girl killed who was 10 years old. You ask yourself, 'If someone that young can be killed, what about me?' " said Ms Efrat Roth, a 17- year-old on a day trip to Jerusalem with her parents. "We were afraid even to come here," she said. "After the bombing happened, we thought we might cancel it, but we have to go on living." That attitude is prevalent among Israelis, citizens of a nation born in conflict that has never really known peace.
"We live our life. If we're here, this is the choice we made and you make it every day you're here," said Ms Sarah Chernichovsky, a 48-year-old social worker. Accompanied by her daughter Noa (10), she was one of the few women with children strolling on Ben Yehuda Street, a pedestrianised thoroughfare normally bustling with tourists and Israelis and scene of a suicide bombing in 1997.
Ms Chernichovsky said the threat of suicide bombers would not keep her away. "The only thing that we've changed in our lifestyle is we're all connected by cellphone now. If something happens, I don't want to wait two hours to know my kids are all right."