War with its neighbors remained a constant for the young but growing and modernizing nation.

Historians count five distinct Arab-Israeli wars.

The War of Independence in 1948 established the newborn state but with Jordan in control of Jerusalem's Old City. The Sinai Campaign of 1956 was waged against Egypt after it closed the Red Sea to Israeli ships, resulting in Israel temporarily occupying the Sinai and Gaza Strip. The Six-Day War of 1967 left Israel's army in control of Sinai, Judea and Samaria, Golan, Gaza and East Jerusalem. The Yom Kippur War of 1973 ended in a cease-fire that returned much of the Sinai to Egypt and established a demilitarized buffer zone between Israel and Syria. The Lebanon War of 1982 left Israeli forces occupying the southern band of Lebanon.

Not counted among the wars is the intifada, which began in 1987 and lasted about three years. It was a period of strikes, riots and occasional violent attacks on Israeli soldiers by youths who'd grown up in Palestinian refugee camps. The violent protests and a resulting brutal crackdown by the Israelis became a catalyst for peace talks between the two.

All the fighting has scarred the land and the people -- Jews like the Ors and Sychs, and the Arabs, as well, many of whom scattered into their own Diaspora in these years of settlement.

Before Sychs and the immigrant farmers arrived, Mazor was an Arab village, Al-Muzeirica, of just over 1,000 inhabitants. Jews bought much of the property from the Arabs with donations that poured into Israel from other Jews around the world. For Palestinians, Mazor was one of more than 200 formerly Arab villages that disappeared -- razed by the Israeli government to make way for settlers or disbanded between 1948 and the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel began occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Until 1967, Mazor was just inside Israel's border. Miri, a child then, still remembers the men of the moshav taking turns standing guard at night "to keep the Arabs from stealing our cows and our horses and from making trouble."

She spits out the word "Arabs" -- animosities in this part of the world are tenacious, given the constant strife.

"The Jews are all the time fighting, all the time trying to be. Just to be," Miri said bitterly. "Even back in Masada. The Jews are all the time finished and all the time having to get up again."

For Israelis, 50 years of wars and insecure statehood have made stress an everyday experience.

Never a day goes by without Americans like Eric and Naomi Weiss reading news from Israel, where so much of their family still lives. Usually, the reports are of war or peace plans, riots or rock-throwings.

There is an edge to life in Israel that most people in most places outside the Mideast never experience. But familiarity breeds routine, and life in Israel can seem quite ordinary, too -- if you don't dig too deeply into the paradoxes.

The focus of Americans is too often on Israel's woes, said Jacob Winternitz, Naomi Weiss' cousin.

"You can see, if you're here for awhile, the daily life is normal and the people feel safe," he said. "If you watch CNN, it looks like the people are in a terrible situation, but we are not."

Winternitz, 52, and Miri, who is 48 now, and their sons, Dvir and Dan, live in Mazor, on the moshav where Miri grew up. Depending on the traffic, it's a 30- to 45-minute commute from Tel Aviv, where Jacob works in a government agency and Miri has a temporary consulting job. Dvir, 19, was inducted into the Israeli army in January; Dan, two years younger, is in high school.

They live in a new neighborhood of cul-de-sacs and side-by-side houses sprouting from what once were fields. The houses are familiar-looking, though small, by the standards of new American suburbs.

Miri and Jacob and Jacob's sister, Ruthi Blank, are sabras, native-born Israelis. Early Zionists took the name from the sabra cactus -- thorny, but with a sweet pear -- that grows in Israel's rocky soil. The Zionist immigrants said their children had to be like that cactus pear -- tough to withstand the dangers of a settler's life, but sweet with each other, and idealistic.

Ruthi is 45 and divorced. She teaches physical education to junior-high-aged kids and lives in an apartment in Herzliya, a leafy suburb of Tel Aviv, with a son Yaniv, 21, who has done his mandatory military service and is in school. Another son, Assaf, 18, went into the tank corps in December.

The Winternitzes built their house about a year ago on a lot that measures 1/2 dunam -- about 3,000 square feet. Miri won the lot through a drawing for sons and daughters of the moshav. The lot is worth about $200,000, Jacob guessed, the house another $200,000. In Herzliya, where Ruthi lives, the price would be two to three times more, he said.

Miri's father, Peres Sych, still lives a few blocks away in a tidy stucco cottage he helped build years ago.

Sych, who suffers from ulcers and other troubles of age, can't farm any longer. He has turned two smaller houses on his property into rentals for Russian immigrants and leased his fields to a flower grower who airlifts carnations by the truckload to Amsterdam florists.

There is a little crime, Jacob said. His car was stolen from his driveway and never seen again. He thinks it was probably driven to the West Bank, out of Israeli jurisdiction.

Copyright © 1998 The Seattle Times Company