When an Arab from East Jerusalem killed eight people at a Jewish seminary, it endangered the fragile fabric of life in a city where people divided by distrust have nonetheless managed to get along.
The shooting was a shock to many Jerusalemites, not only because it followed a long period of relative quiet, but also because even in the peak years of Palestinian suicide bombings, the Arabs of East Jerusalem were largely bystanders.
In the aftermath, the city's Jews fear for their safety, while Arabs are wary of a backlash.
About two-thirds of Jerusalem's 700,000 residents are Jews, and the rest are Palestinians who came under Israeli control when Israel captured their part of the city in 1967. Jerusalem's Arabs are not Israeli citizens but hold Israeli ID cards that allow them freedom of movement in the city and throughout Israel.
One of them was Alaa Abu Dheim, 25, the gunman who crossed into Jewish Jerusalem with an assault rifle Thursday and killed seven teenagers and a 26-year-old in a library at the Mercaz Harav seminary. Abu Dheim was shot and killed on the scene.
Yesterday, three days after the first major Palestinian attack in the city since 2004, the division between Jerusalem's Arabs and Jews could not have seemed more stark.
At Abu Dheim's home in the neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber, his family received visitors and served food in a traditional mourning tent. Children proudly displayed posters with the attacker's photograph superimposed over the golden dome of the Al-Aqsa mosque, considered Islam's third-holiest site, in Jerusalem's Old City.
Not far away, where Abu Dheim's neighborhood borders a Jewish one called East Talpiot, a small group of hard-line Jewish protesters tried to march on the home to tear the tent down, calling for the expulsion of Arabs from Jerusalem and from Israel. Some Israeli lawmakers were demanding physical separation between the city's Arabs and Jews and for restrictions on the movement of Arab residents.
When a moderate Israeli cabinet minister paid a condolence call to the seminary that was attacked, she was chased away with calls of "murderer" from hard-line religious protesters who oppose the Israeli government's peace talks with the Palestinians. The targeted school is an ideological center for religious hard-liners and the Jewish settlement movement in the West Bank.
Yesterday, Mohammed Faqeih, 24, from the Arab neighborhood of Beit Hanina, was back at his job in a vegetable stall in West Jerusalem's open-air market. But tempers ran high in the market immediately after the attack Thursday, he said, and he got into a fistfight with an incensed Jewish worker. He was still worried that someone might try to exact revenge.
"The future is not good. There is no security for Arabs. We are exposed to danger," Faqeih said.
And yet Jerusalem continued to function, often with the absurd complexity residents have become used to.
After delivering arrest orders for some family members, Israeli police allowed the Abu Dheim family to honor the attacker in their mourning tent, despite calls from some Israelis to shut it down. In neighboring Jordan, meanwhile, the country's Arab regime prevented Abu Dheim's relatives there from erecting a tent and refused entry to those wishing to pay condolences.
Not far from Abu Dheim's home, on the border between the Arabs of Jabel Mukaber and the Jews of East Talpiot, Arab workers continued to erect a towering metal pillar dedicated to coexistence. Donated by a Polish philanthropist, it is dubbed the "Tolerance Park and Monument."
At the Shaare Zedek Medical Center where most of the wounded from the shooting attack were taken, ultra-Orthodox Jews in black coats sat in a waiting room alongside Arab women in Islamic head scarves. The ward was designed by David Appelbaum, an Israeli doctor who was killed in a Palestinian suicide bombing in a Jerusalem cafe in 2003.
The mixed medical staff at Shaare Zedek work cordially alongside each other no matter what happens outside, said Maher Deeb, who heads the chest surgery ward and lives in the Palestinian town of Beit Jalla.
"The hospital is a unique situation. The hospital doesn't really represent what's going on outside. What's going on outside is insane," he said.
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