Around 600 Jewish settlers occupy a tiny enclave in the heart of Hebron, living in the midst of the surrounding Palestinian population of up to 140,000, in one of the most tense and heavily guarded trouble spots in the West Bank.
Yet tens of thousands of supporters from Israel and tourists from abroad flooded to Hebron, causing snarl ups on the main road from Jerusalem to the southern West Bank city, to join the settlers in celebration of Sukkot.
Hundreds of young people danced to Hasidic music on a platform erected by organizers, below the Cave of the Patriarchs, a sacred site for both Jews and Muslims, for festivities akin to the atmosphere of a village fair.
The seven-day Feast of Tabernacles is a joyful, family oriented holiday that follows the somber introspection of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, which fell earlier this month.
During Sukkot, Jews build and eat, even sleep, in huts topped with thatch or palm branches to commemorate the temporary homes of their ancestors during their 40 years in the wilderness after being liberated from slavery in Egypt.
Yet as the Jewish settlers celebrated, most of their Muslim neighbors were secluded in their homes for the holy, fasting month of Ramadan, which concludes later this month with the Eid Al Fitr celebration.
The large Jewish crowd - which organizers claimed numbered 50,000 throughout the day - was on hand to watch the popular Jewish American singer, Mordechai Ben David, who got caught up in the middle of the Orthodox masses.
"We demand the right to live in these houses, which belong to the Jewish people," said one of the faithful, Rivka Zerbib, a settler from France who has lived in the Jewish district of Hebron for the past 20 years.
Zerbib was referring to closed shops in an old Arab market where a group of radical Jewish settlers had been squatting up until they were evicted by the Israeli military a few months ago.
At the entrance to the market, the settlers put up a giant billboard reading: "This district is stolen Jewish property, we demand it back."
The market was built on the ruins of the old Jewish district - destroyed after riots in 1929 - when 67 Jews were massacred by their Arab neighbors in the city.
In the modern-day streets, salesmen offer memorabilia from Hebron or from Jewish settlements dismantled in the Gaza Strip during Israel's unilateral withdrawal from the territory in August last year after 38 years of occupation.
Among them are key-rings and printed T-shirts bearing inscriptions such as "Hebron for eternity" or "Gaza: We will never forget."
As the revelry continued, heavily armed security forces kept watch on the surroundings, particularly the roofs and balconies of Palestinian houses overhanging the lanes of the old town invaded by the Jews.
In 2002, during what is an annual pilgrimage to Hebron during Sukkot, an Israeli was shot dead from a house close to the Jewish enclave.
Although Israel withdrew troops from four-fifths of Hebron in January 1997 and handed control to the Palestinian Authority, the Jewish state continues to control the center of the city, home to the settlers and the sacred site.
© 2006 Agence France-Presse