SKIP TO THE NEXT STOP: Palestinian Gaza: Life Behind Walls

To get home to the settlement-suburb Nisanit, Jewish settlers first pass the Erez industrial zone.

Hundreds of miles from the Seam Line border, the Gaza Strip is a narrow, sealed island of more than a million Palestinians. After 1967, the Israeli government helped establish what now number about 7,000 Jewish settlers here. Many of them settled here to live out a vision of a Greater Israel that includes Gaza. A few just took advantage of government tax breaks to keep ahead of the mortgage. Now they are all involved in a life-or-death struggle to hold the Israeli line.

Ilan Ragolsky agrees to drive me into the Jewish settlement of Nisanit on the northwestern side of the Gaza Strip. At the checkpoint, settlers one car ahead of us wave to the soldiers as though they're guards at any pleasant gated community and drive through. But I have to stop. Looking at my passport, the guard asks questions about the stamps from Arab countries. Ilan starts talking. "She's a journalist," he says. "Come on, she's one of us, she's Jewish!"

Ilana Lopo says she will not leave Gaza even though she can't sleep nights because of fighting.

"I can see from her name," says the guard. "All right, go ahead."

Ilan drives in, and through a single cyclone fence we look into Palestinian Gaza. Ilan has a gun holstered in a nylon and Velcro case alongside his cell phone -- which may reassure him but only makes me more nervous.

Ilan and I pull into a neighborhood that looks new and oddly bare, full of suburban quiet -- except for the Humvees gunning their motors and the dozens of soldiers sitting under camouflage netting just out of view of the front yards. Army jeeps are more common here than children's bicycles.

Ilana Lopo, strolling through the neighborhood in bicycle shorts and running shoes, stops to talk. She says her family was one of the first to move to Nisanit a decade ago, to be near relatives in the more militant settlement of Gush Katif. She's a single mother with three sons. Ilana says she used to work for an Israeli company called Green Line as a customs broker for the Palestinian Authority areas. At the beginning of the intifada, the border closed for months, imports plummeted, and she was laid off. "All the dreams are broken," says Ilana.

The fence and Israeli army guard station between the Jewish settlement of Nisanit and Palestinian Gaza.

Her children talk about shooting all the time, and even her 5-year-old plays games that include Qassem rockets. "He was born in it," says Ilana, as her neighbor's baby coos.

"Every night they try to break inside through the fences," says Ilana. "Each night, all the time for two years, there's shooting. You hear everything, all the soldiers, the tanks, the bombs. You don't sleep soundly even once. Never. I don't remember one night. Sometimes the silence it scares you more than the bombs. You know that something will happen soon." Many of her neighbors are going to get out. They are just waiting for compensation from the government. But Ilana says she won't go.

"Why don't you leave?" I ask.

"I love it here," she says. In central Israel, she's always nervous about a potential terror attack. Here, she says, despite the small war just outside her neighborhood, she feels safer. "Here I feel much more comfortable because I know the soldiers are here."

This is the irony of living directly on the border. The task of Zionism is to make the border zones powerful so that Jews are safe and the state grows strong. The task of Palestinian terror is to make all of the center a border zone, where no Israeli Jew can ever forget the unpaid land debt to refugee Palestinian Arabs.