Shooting leaves holy city on edge

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.