It is twilight on a Friday. Jews are celebrating the approach of Shabbat, their holy day. In mosques, Muslims are praying and preparing to celebrate the end of their holy month of Ramadan.

An orange haze -- smoke? dust? -- drifts among floodlights trained on the Western Wall, all that remains of the Second Temple of the Jews, destroyed by the Romans.

Jerusalem's Old City is divided into quarters -- Jewish, Muslim, Armenian and Christian. The wall serves as a religious divide between Jews and Muslims.

On one side -- the Muslim side -- the gold-leafed Dome of the Rock, the holiest place in Israel for Muslims, glows in the gathering darkness.

The wall itself is the Jews' holiest place. And on their side of it, a dozen ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews, wearing grand fur hats the size of hibernating bear cubs atop their curling earlocks, rock back and forth in prayer, ignoring the tourists who have come to stare at them.

The tourists have made their way through a battalion of khaki-clad Israeli soldiers, who are using the plaza facing the wall as a staging area for riot control. This is the last Friday of Ramadan, the Muslims' holy month. Earlier in the afternoon, 350,000 Muslims gathered at the Dome to pray, but most have gone home.

All day, the Jewish quarter of the Old City has buzzed with rumors that there could be a riot. So the soldiers, mostly teens of both sexes, are at the wall in case of trouble. They mill about the vans that brought them, sorting out their arsenal and joking like sports fans at a tailgate party.

The last notes of a Muslim call to prayer waft over the wall from the Dome and hang in the golden haze.

Suddenly, from the Arab neighborhood below the Dome comes the pop, pop, pop of gunfire. The army on the Jewish side skips a spotlight along the top of the wall. Somewhere a siren screams. The orange air takes on a smoky smell.

But the Jews praying at the wall don't stop. The tourists don't blink. And the troops don't leap into action.

The tension is broken, the muscles flexed, no harm done.

It's a scene Dali might have imagined -- surreal, full of posturing, radiant beauty and throbbing symbolism.

This is Israel on the eve of its 50th year of independence: fleeting storms in the midst of a shaky calm; momentary weirdness and life goes on.

A young man, movie-star handsome with dark eyes, glowers defiantly from a photograph that is the centerpiece of a shrine in a souvenir stall in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. The frame is tin, hammered a thousand times in anger and inspiration until it has become beautiful. The shopkeeper, a large Arab man with watery eyes, fingers his prayer beads, marking 99 ways Muslims have to say Allah. He stops to explain the memorial. It's of his son, dead in the intifadah.

Another young man, with dark eyes that crinkle at the corners when he smiles, proudly holds a sculpture he keeps in a corner of his bedroom in his house at Mazor. It is a free-form shape in plaster the pale rosy-gold color of the stones used to build Jerusalem. Blue glass shards cut through the plaster and it sparkles with little flashlight bulbs he has wired through it.

This young man is Dvir Winternitz, elder son of Jacob and Miri, artist and soldier. The sculpture means nothing, Dvir says. But to an outsider, it evokes his homeland's war-torn culture. Hard. Jagged. Wired with undercurrents of darkness and disconnected beauty.

Violence here is a spark away. The intifada began in 1987 after four Arabs died in a collision between a carful of Palestinians and an Israeli truck. People said it was no accident, that the crash was reprisal for the stabbing of an Israeli in Gaza. The unrest that resulted -- often pitting Israeli soldiers against rock-throwing children in meaningless street battles -- finally ran down in 1991 with the Gulf War and the intensified peace talks that followed.

But hundreds of people -- youths like the shopkeeper's son, Israeli soldiers -- died.

Copyright © 1998 The Seattle Times Company