Anyone who has known Belfast during the Troubles would feel at home in Hebron. Two communities at loggerheads, soldiers on patrol, barricades and checkpoints, fear and tension.
Things may be getting better in Belfast, but they are getting worse in Hebron.
There is a madness in the air that tells you this place and this region are spinning out of control.
Even when we stopped to buy petrol on the way, the young attendant told us he was looking forward to his Israeli army callup, so he could learn how to shoot.
Russian by birth, he insisted in the language of Tolstoy and Gogol that he was now Israeli.
This frontier spirit is also in evidence at the controversial Jewish settlement in Hebron where 700 residents are holding out in a district where 20,000 Palestinians live.
They have substantial protection from Israeli soldiers and police who patrol on foot and in jeeps or stand guard in watchtowers or sentry-posts.
The spokesman for the Jewish community is Mr David Wilder, originally from Bergen County, New Jersey, who has been here for 25 years.
He is unique among press spokesmen I have met in that he carries a pistol in his belt which, happily, he has never had to use.
There is a children's playground outside his office, under the gaze of the soldiers. Sandpits and sandbags, slides and semiautomatic weapons, swings and slingshots: that's Hebron today.
Children make up over half of the Jewish population in the city. Mr Wilder has seven: "That's a small family in Hebron."
Despite living under siege, he plans to stay and raise his children here. "My children are growing up with a life that's centred around ideals, not movies and Internet sex and drugs."
His children pray at the Tomb of the Patriarchs nearby. "Hebron is the second holiest site of the Jewish people.
"If the Jews left Hebron, this sacred place would become off-limits to them," he maintains.
"I believe that a Jew should live in the land of Israel."
The bulk of the media and liberal opinion may be horrified by footage of Israeli troops shooting young Palestinian stone-throwers, but Mr Wilder has a different perspective.
He stresses the fact that there is shooting from the Arab side. His own community and indeed his own residence are being shot at. Liberal opinion might view Israeli army tactics as harsh and even brutal, but Mr Wilder believes the soldiers are in "handcuffs" and would like to see them given a freer hand.
He paints a picture of the "thug and terrorist" Yasser Arafat starting a war, "even a mini-war", against the Israelis.
"We are fighting a war but there are people who don't understand that and that the people who are attacking us are our enemies," he said.
"That's why Israel hasn't taken the gloves off. They are sort of playing games."
He rejects the label of fanatical extremist: "This is our homeland and these are our homes."
He believes the situation is going to explode and would like this to happen before the Palestinians get any stronger.
The present uprising is "just a taste of things to come if Israel doesn't stop it".
Outside, in the Palestinian quarter, a scene one associates with Ireland in the 19th century: street-stalls, poverty, dust and misery.
An elderly man in an Arab kaffiyeh headscarf hobbles by. He received six bullets in the leg when the Zionist fanatic Baruch Goldstein shot up the local mosque, killing 29 people.
The Jews have had their massacre, too, and a memorial exists to the 1929 atrocity in which 67 people died.
Downtown, children as young as seven or eight are starting the daily round of stone-throwing and tyre-burning against the heavily-armed soldiers.
Already the rubber bullets are starting to fly, but the youths remain undeterred. Another riot has started in the nearby refugee camp at Arub, and boys at al-Khadr are throwing stones at cars with Jerusalem number-plates.
The Intifada (uprising) continues despite Israeli attempts at containment. A Palestinian vows: "We will continue resisting them as long as we are alive."