Two years in Jerusalem may not make one an expert, but it is enough time to become familiar with a few places, a few people at the least, and enough time to be stunned at recent events. From her home in California, PNS commentator Robin Shulman called friends in a place she thought she knew, to ask if they are safe, how they feel, and what they think will happen. Shulman discovered that the human connections are breaking apart on all sides.

Khaled Abdel Karim Amer was not trained to remove bullets from children's skulls, but he is doing just that in East Jerusalem.

The Palestinian neurosurgeon cannot go to his job in an Israeli hospital in West Jerusalem, five minutes from his home, because the roads are patrolled by Israeli soldiers shooting at Palestinian demonstrators.

I met Khaled when I lived in Jerusalem for two years. Now I'm speaking with him over the phone from Berkeley. I've been calling people I know, friends in Jerusalem, stunned at the violence coursing through a place I thought I knew. At one checkpoint, tanks have replaced the taxis I used to catch. A Palestinian mob dragged an Israeli soldier through a square in Ramallah where I used to meet friends.

Khaled has plenty of work, he tells me over the phone. In one week, he has treated 14 Palestinian children aged 6 to 15, wounded by rubber bullets as well as metal-jacket rounds to the head and chest.

"They shoot only to the head. It's an injury to die," he says. Soldiers sometimes prevent ambulances from getting to the hospital. "I think for the first time that Israel doesn't want peace."

Khaled, 28, lives with five younger sisters and his parents in Beit Hanina, an Arab neighborhood on the northern outskirts of Jerusalem. His sisters used to take me outside to pick berries, grapes and sabra cactus fruit.

Those days are over. Last week, Israelis from the neighboring Jewish settlement of Pisgat Ze'ev shot at Khaled's neighbor's house, wounding an 8-year-old boy. Israeli police on the scene didn't stop them.

It was a turning point for Khaled. "In the first Intifada, Israel didn't use planes, rockets and bombs. Then, many people still believed Israel was democratic. Now no one does."

Ori Lewis, 41, one of the Israelis living in Pisgat Ze'ev, also witnessed an attack -- at 2 a.m. on Yom Kippur, when he saw 50 or 60 young Israelis approaching Arab houses. "They were throwing rocks and cursing at them," Ori said. The Palestinians "came out and cursed back in Hebrew and started throwing rocks back."

"There's no way the trust is going to be rebuilt," said Ori, who has lived in this community for nine years. He and his wife Dorcas were scheduled to look at a house five minutes into the West Bank, where real estate is cheaper, but when the violence began they threw the ad away.

"No way are we going to live in a place like this," Ori said. He worries that nearby Palestinians will retaliate for the attacks this week. His son's school worries that one of the Arab school bus drivers might be "put up to causing a deliberate accident," Ori said.

Sometimes he thinks about leaving Israel altogether. "When you come away from Israel," he said, "you realize that people here are preoccupied with all the wrong things to lead a normal life."

Mohanad Sbeih, 25, like many Palestinians his age, spent years in Israeli jails for organizing neighborhood youth during the Intifada.

Since his release, he has had low-paying jobs in Israel. His ID card is Israeli and he speaks fluent Hebrew -- but that didn't prevent Israeli soldiers and police from stopping and interrogating him several times during a car ride, each time I drove with him.

Like Khaled, Mohanad lives in Beit Hanina. To get to work at a West Jerusalem flower shop, he has to enter the West Bank and then circle back through an Israeli checkpoint.

Mohanad expresses amazement at the current violence on both sides. "The Palestinians were wrong to kill those soldiers -- they're crazy!" he said. "I go to my neighbor's roof, and we watch helicopters, hear the bombs. This is not an intifada, this is war."

In the midst of this war, Yam Greenstein, 39 and an Israeli, tries to maintain calm. She lives in Abu Tor -- a divided neighborhood straddling the armistice line between Israel and Jordan.

Yam's is the last house on the Jewish side. Yam, a sculptor, often works in her garden of jasmine and cactus with a spectacular view of the walled Old City. This week, the view was of fires from nearby clashes. Yam saw three Israeli men with a dog on their way to the Arab side "looking to make problems."

For her parents, both Holocaust survivors, the violence recalls deep fears. Yam says, "My father says the country is going to end, disappear."

Yam herself is trying to avoid fear by staying away from crowded public places. "It's very hard to ignore the tension. It's catchy, people get it from one another."

For two years, Miguel Murado, a prominent poet, novelist and journalist in Spain, has worked at the United Nations office in Bethlehem, 10 minutes south of Jerusalem.

Last Friday morning, the UN began to evacuate all but essential personnel. Miguel said they asked him to relinquish his health insurance and sign a form absolving the UN of responsibility should he come to harm.

In fact, Miguel has not gone to work for weeks because the road has not been safe. "I have Israeli plates. When I go to Bethlehem, I put this keffiyeh [Palestinian scarf] in a visible place," he said.

Miguel lives in Musrara, a Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem, on the seam between east and west, and Thursday he saw a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews hurling stones at two Palestinians.

"For me it's like living in a totally different country," Miguel told me. "When you were here the atmosphere was tense, bad, nasty -- but this is really scary," he said. "Armed gangs killing each other."

I left Jerusalem two months ago, and I am glad I'm not there now. It would be hard for me to maintain my normal life there, in which, like Miguel, I crossed among Israelis and Palestinians.