Shooting leaves holy city on edge

Residents' fears center on safety, possible backlash

Fliers bearing gunman Alaa Abu Dheim's image were on display yesterday at a mourning tent in East Jerusalem. (Peter Dejong/Associated Press)

JERUSALEM - When a Palestinian living in 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, Palestinians in East Jerusalem were largely bystanders.

In the aftermath, the city's Jews fear for their safety, while Palestinians 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 the Jordanian-held eastern 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 the city'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, 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 Palestinians and Jews and for restrictions on the movement of Palestinian 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, a 24-year-old 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.

Just up the street, Yaron Kortik sat outside his small cafe. An Israeli, Kortik was infuriated by the attack, calling it a massacre. He said he is now afraid that every Arab he sees is a potential assailant, even the East Jerusalemites who come in a truck every morning delivering dairy products.

"I can't even say 'hello' or 'goodbye' to my Arab customers right now," he said.

And yet Jerusalem continued to function, often with the absurd complexity residents have become used to.

After delivering arrest orders for some relatives, 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.

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 Palestinian women in Islamic headscarves. The ward was designed by Dr. David Appelbaum, an Israeli who was killed in a Palestinian suicide bombing in a Jerusalem cafe in 2003.

The mixed medical staff at Shaare Zedek work cordially alongside one another no matter what happens outside, said Dr. Maher Deeb, who heads the chest surgery ward and lives in the Palestinian town of Beit Jalla.

"The hospital doesn't really represent what's going on outside. What's going on outside is insane," he said.

But on Ben Yehuda Street, the heart of Jewish Jerusalem, Nuha Khalil, 38, walked with her 1-year-old son while wearing an Islamic head scarf.

"I notice that the looks some people give me are different, but I wasn't afraid," she said. "I feel safe. That's why I came here to shop."