Riding a fine line

While in some ways that has happened, with up to 140,000 people - from ultra-Orthodox Jews to Palestinian workers, Muslim schoolgirls and Israeli bureaucrats - using the train each day, the past few months have torn that cosmopolitan picture apart.

Since the July murder of a 16-year-old Palestinian, burned to death by Jewish assailants in revenge for the murder of three Jewish teenagers, the light rail has become a target of almost daily attacks by Palestinian youths throwing rocks, stones and petrol bombs.

Passenger numbers dropped by 20 percent and at one point a third of the tram's 46 carriages were too damaged to be used.

On board, a Palestinian woman (pictured above, left) sits alongside an Israeli woman. There are Palestinian farmers going to the market and boys going to school, everyone chatting on mobile phones in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Amharic and English.

However, large concrete blocks have now been placed at vulnerable stations, large Armed guards in flak jackets walk the platforms, and men with automatic rifles patrol the trains watching faces, sometimes checking IDs, searching for potential bombs.

Tourists like it, with its quick access to the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum at one end of the line, the famed Mahane Yehuda market in the middle and the breathtaking Old City views.

But for many young Palestinians it remains a source of hatred, the anger stemming in part from the fact that while the train runs through two Palestinian districts, its destination at the northeast end is the Jewish settlement of Pisgat Ze'ev.