As quietly as the Winternitzes and Ruthi Blank live, war is never far from their minds. After all, Blank said, one of Saddam Hussein's Scud missiles fell into the sea at Herzliya, less than 10 miles northwest of Mazor, during the Gulf War.

That was in 1991, the year the Israeli government began requiring that all new homes be built with bomb shelters in the basement.

In the cities, shelters are required in office buildings, apartments, schools and hotels. There are shelters for people who might be outdoors when the alarm sounds for an attack. In a new park in Tel Aviv, a doorway leads into the side of a berm; it is painted dirt brown as camouflage, but still noticeable. There's no pretense of camouflage for a pie-shaped concrete shelter jutting up from a children's playground on a kibbutz near the Sea of Galilee; it is decorated with cartoons, Donald Duck with some flowers.

In her new house in Jerusalem, Ruth Or uses the metal lever that opens her bomb shelter as a convenient place to hang her ironing.

Or's bunker looks like a basement bedroom, but the outside wall is concrete, three feet thick, and there's only one dim window, high, near the ceiling. Like most people, she keeps plastic sheeting, duct tape and gas masks handy in case an attack comes as poison gas.

"We never know here where the enemy will come from, so we're always ready," she said. "Maybe Iran will throw bombs at us, maybe the Iraqis. Who knows? Maybe the Syrians or the Egyptians."

Or maybe the Palestinians.

The political situation in Israel is complicated. About 2.5 million people live in the West Bank and Gaza, where portions of the old Palestine have been turned over to limited Arab control. The West Bank is seen by much of the world as being occupied by Israel, and recent rounds of peace talks have focused on Israeli troop withdrawals. Palestinians see it as the core of a future Palestinian state.

For the Palestinians, Israel is where the jobs are, and many Palestinians regularly cross the border to go to work. Unless Israeli soldiers throw up a temporary roadblock, the border is invisible; there's often no indication at all of having passed into the disputed territories.

Arabs make up about 19 percent of Israel's population, not counting the West Bank and Gaza. Most Arabs in Israel are Muslims; about 2 percent of Israelis are Christians.

Israeli Arabs and Jews live in separate towns, villages and settlements, although Jewish settlers move into Arab areas regularly -- even those in the West Bank and Gaza -- providing a constant irritant. Schools are segregated. The Arab towns in Israel tend to look less prosperous, on the whole, than the Jewish settlements. But they are not as poor as the Palestinian towns in Gaza and the West Bank.

There is little trust between Jew and Arab anywhere in the country.

"I wouldn't go near the Old City this week," Ruthi Blank warned in January, days before what became the crisis over weapons inspections in Iraq. "There are all sorts of tensions and rumors and intelligence that there might be some kind of terrorist activities."

Such premonitions and warnings among Israelis are not uncommon. They can't tell you how they know when times are dangerous. But they all seem to know.

"Word just gets around," Blank shrugged. "Sometimes you hear it on the radio. Sometimes the police set up roadblocks and tie up traffic and we know that's what it means."

"If I lived in a place like Seattle, I would think about that. I wouldn't come here."

Copyright © 1998 The Seattle Times Company