Occupied Jerusalem: Like many residents of the prosperous Occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Shuafat, Waleed Abu Khudair lives a life in two cultures: His neighbours are predominantly Palestinian, but his boss and customers at a popular West Jerusalem bakery are Jewish.

It’s a dualism that has worked for years. But in recent days, the delicate balance has fallen apart.
Since three Israeli teens were kidnapped and murdered last month, the 51-year-old Palestinian said he has been attacked several times by Israeli extremists wielding pepper spray and eggs.

Then on Wednesday, his nephew disappeared before dawn. The charred body of 17-year-old Mohammad Abu Khudair was later found in Jerusalem Forest, and Shuafat was instantly transformed from a quiet middle-class community to the newest focal point for decades of Palestinian grievance.

In many ways, Shuafat is an unlikely venue for protests that many fear could herald a new intifada, or mass uprising, against the Israeli occupation. Unlike the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where Israelis and Palestinians rarely, if ever, interact, the Palestinian residents of Shuafat have regular contact with Jews living on both sides of the invisible line dividing this city between east and west. Many Palestinian residents go to work across town, in the city’s largely Jewish west, and Hebrew is still widely understood in Shuafat.
On Saturday, protests spread to several predominantly Palestinian towns in 1948 areas — other places where cross-cultural interaction has continued through decades of conflict. The demonstrations included one in Nazareth, the largest majority-Arab city in Israel.

The outpouring of anger in Arab areas that remain deeply intertwined in the fabric of Israel could be a worrying development for Israeli officials because those places are far more difficult to isolate than Gaza and the West Bank, both of which are walled off for all practical purposes. Abu Khudair’s relatives, who mourned his death as neighbours attempted to clean up on Saturday from days of protests, said that until recent weeks, life had been quiet in Shuafat, their relations with Jewish Israelis unremarkable.

“We live a very normal life here. Jews come shopping here, and we go to the mall in their neighbourhood. There is nothing between us and them,” said Suha Abu Khudair, who was still reckoning on Saturday with the idea that her son, Mohammad, has become the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’s latest martyr.

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