Down the capital's mean streets

By ABE SELIG
The word on the east Jerusalem street after Tuesday's bulldozer attack in the capital was mixed. Just inside Damascus Gate, sitting outside a vegetable stand, a man named Rabiya said he didn't approve of the attack, and advised his fellow east Jerusalemites to stay away from "trouble." "If you are smart," he said in fluent Hebrew, "you keep as far away from that stuff as possible. If not, you get the police involved, and the army. Who needs that? But if you work hard, you can live like a king in this country. That's what I do, I just work all day." But from there on the mood was mostly hostile, with many doubting the validity of news reports on the attack by an east Jerusalem man, and the continuing violence between the IDF and terrorists. "[The Israelis] kill us, so it is to be expected that we are very angry," said a young man named Dauod. "They kill us every day, so we have to fight back." Many people refused to speak to reporters, while some maintained that they knew nothing of the attack and wished to be left alone. Others called the attack unsuccessful, as only the attacker was killed. "You cannot call this an attack," said Muhammad as he sat in a coffee house smoking a water pipe. "He didn't even kill anybody, so how is that an attack?" Down the street at the Cool Net Internet cafe, Suhaib and his coworker expressed a slightly more cool-headed tone. "It's a very bad situation," Suhaib said. "No one is happy." His coworker, who preferred to remain anonymous, said he was skeptical on the details of the July 2 attack in which Husam Taysir Dwayat, another east Jerusalem man, went on a rampage with his bulldozer, killing three civilians before being shot by an off-duty soldier. "I heard it was not on purpose," he said of that attack. "He was scared, so he drove into cars and the police shot him. The Jews are so scared, they just use their guns out of fear."