His wife drives a minivan with government-issued, rock-proof windows. His children ride to school in bulletproof buses. The supermarket where he shops and a health clinic in his West Bank town, Efrat, have both been bombed in the past few months.

But Kleiman, a 39-year-old former Raleigh resident, and other Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are seen by many in the Middle East as major obstacles to regional peace.

They live on land that Israel conquered from Jordan and Egypt in the Six-Day War of 1967. Since then, the United Nations has passed resolutions stating that the conquered territories should become a new Palestinian state, and several Israeli governments have agreed to the idea in principle.

Jewish settlements, however, have grown continually in size and number. There are now about 250 Jewish towns in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with a total of about 183,000 residents. Their mere presence, often on strategic hilltops, is a constant reminder to Palestinians of their powerlessness to control land they desire for a country of their own.

Palestinian anger has found expression in rocks, bullets and bombs. The Israeli military has employed a variety of measures to protect the settlers, including checkpoints, home demolitions and targeted killings of Palestinians whom the Israelis believed responsible for the bombing attacks -- and Palestinian hatred has intensified.

Many of the settlers, like Kleiman, are driven by an intense beliefthat Jews have a duty to reclaim ancestral land promised them by God. They refer to the territories by their biblical names, Judeah and Samaria, and see themselves as a vanguard protecting Jewish life in Israel, and by extension, all the world's Jews.

There is tension, however, between the Kleimans and their five children, all of whom know someone who died in an attack. The children would rather live in Raleigh.

"It's scary here. It's not something I want for my entire life," said Tzviya, 12, who is still angry with her parents for taking her away from North Raleigh. "I feel like Raleigh is a better place to raise a family."

Closing 'the loop'

Kleiman calls living in the West Bank the closing of two historical family loops.

His parents fled persecution twice, first during the Holocaust when they escaped from Nazi-occupied Poland and Lithuania to Cuba, and then to Puerto Rico after the Batista regime fell to Communist control.

His wife's father, Baruch Liptscher, fled Nazi Germany to live in Palestine. But in 1948, on the day after the U.N. voted to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, the Jordanian army overran the town where Liptscher lived, Massuot Yitzhak -- and Liptscher was a refugee once again. Today, the Kleiman family lives a short way uphill from Massuot Yitzhak.

More than 200 people died in Massuot Yitzhak. Kleiman's father-in-law survived only because he had taken the women and children to Jerusalem before the battle.

"The small loop started in 1948," Kleiman said. "The bigger loop is my grandparents ran from the Nazis, my parents ran from Cuba, and I'm hoping that my children don't have to run from anybody."

Kleiman's determination is rooted in about 700 years of Jews' being murdered and chased around Europe because of their religion.

He is convinced that Arab aggression toward Israel will never cease.

"Some people say the problem is the settlements, [but] before '67 there were no settlements, and was there peace then?" he asked. "If [we] return the settlements, then what? Do I go to Tel Aviv? And once I go to Tel Aviv, where do I go from there?"

Kleiman's roots

Kleiman was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He spent his youth as a member of the Young Judeah Zionist youth movement, an organization that promotes education and travel to Israel, and attended Camp Judea in Hendersonville, N.C. He spent a year in Israel before college, and then returned after college, when he met and married his wife, Ilana. They joined about 30 families to found a new settlement called Atzmona in the Gaza Strip in 1986.

Kleiman moved with his family to the North Ridge neighborhood of North Raleigh in 1995 to work with his uncle on Csoft International, a spinoff from Post Software International, which in turn was a spinoff from IBM. They stayed five years, long enough for their five children to learn English, make friends and learn to love computer games and American music videos.

"I love North Carolina, always have, and after 10 years of intifadah in different areas [of Israel], it was a good break and it was a good business opportunity for us," Kleiman said.

When they returned to the Middle East, he said, they chose to live in Efrat because they liked the American lifestyle and the proximity to Jerusalem, in addition to ideological reasons.

Efrat has about 9,000 residents. It was founded in 1981 in an area called Gush Etzion. Some of the land had been purchased before 1948 by Jewish philanthropists. The name Efrat is often mentioned in the Bible, usually in connection with its sister city, Bethlehem. It's a 20-minute ride from Jerusalem, where most of the town's residents work, and it boasts American-style grocery stores, spacious American-style homes and more than 50 percent English-speaking residents. It looks like a cookie-cutter American suburb built with Jerusalem limestone and terra-cotta roofs.

After a trip to the supermarket for a box of hamburgers, yogurt and frozen french fries, Kleiman voiced a rare regret: "One of the things we miss the most is Harris Teeter."

Kleiman works as an independent technology consultant, helping small start-ups get into the market. He spends much of his time traveling the country in his Volvo sedan, making appointments with customers over the car's speakerphone.

Life in Efrat

Trips in and out of the West Bank often mean taking the tunnel road, which was built to bypass Bethlehem after settlers were shot to death or wounded. Its two tunnels were the first such features in the country, and are considered an added safety measure.

More settlers were shot once they exited the tunnels, however, so the government erected huge concrete barriers in long solid stretches and short dashes to block the bullets.

"The Israeli response for two years was these ridiculous things," Kleiman said pointing to the barriers on his way home after doing business in Jerusalem recently. He complained that it was not until suicide bombings and shooting attacks became routine in Israel's major population centers -- and not just on the West Bank -- that the country cracked down on terrorist networks last month.

"We're the only country in the world that allows its people to be shot at and plays politics instead of defending its people," he said.

Some settlers carry guns and wear bulletproof vests and helmets for protection, but not Kleiman. He carries a firearm only when traveling to study at his 16-year-old son Doron's religious boarding school in the settlement of Qiryat Arba every Thursday night.

Qiryat Arba, about 20 minutes from Efrat, overlooks the biblical city of Hebron. The two are separated by terraced fields, scattered olive trees and goat pasture. Doron's math teacher, a bearded man with a booming voice who invites his students to gather in haphazard fashion around his desk during lectures, wears a large-caliber handgun in a holster.

"It's not easy for me to send my kid to stay in a dorm surrounded completely by Arabs," Kleiman said after leaving Doron at the school while his middle son, Yehuda, 14, accepted a ride home.

Father and son promptly started arguing about a number of safety-related topics. First, Yehuda contradicted Kleiman's assertion that armored personnel carriers are vulnerable to small-arms fire at close range. Kleiman drives the military vehicles when he is on reserve duty, which is several weeks a year. But Yehuda was convinced that, "It would not make sense to have an APC carry men and not be good against bullets."

Next, Yehuda tried to convince Kleiman that his habit of getting to school by hitchhiking, a common practice in Israel, was safe. "If it's an Israeli [driver], it's not a concern," he said. "You can see the license plate for Arabs is black and blue or white and blue." Israeli plates are yellow with black print.

Kleiman reminded his son that a number of soldiers -- not merely high school students -- have been picked up hitchhiking in the region and their bodies later found slashed, shot or stabbed.

Violence & progress

For Kleiman and other settlers in the West Bank, the shooting attacks and suicide bombings that have occurred in Israel's coastal cities since the second intifadah began in September 2000 are nothing new. They see the recent Israeli military actions against suspected Palestinian terror networks as encouraging.

"Finally the Jewish people feel as one and understood that it wasn't only that [Palestinian gunmen] were shooting at my kids because they live on 'a settlement,' " Kleiman said. "Not only were they bombing the cafes in Jerusalem, but they were bombing the cafes in Jaffa, Tel Aviv and in Haifa."

To Kleiman, the attacks prove that most Palestinians want not a return to pre-1967 borders, but all of Israel. "That's their basis," he said.

Kleiman acknowledged that historically Jews had a much harder time living under Christianity than under Islam. "Our conflict with the Arabs is much more of a family feud than it is a cultural feud," he said. But he also referred with contempt to Arab institutions, saying: "We're an island of democracy in a sea of despots."

Ilana Kleiman, 40, who spends much of her day cooking and helping the couple's two younger children, Barak and Rachel, both 10, with their homework and religious studies, has scant sympathy for what Palestinians say is a humiliating occupation of their homeland.

"I know they say they are oppressed," Ilana Kleiman said. "But if they think they are oppressed, they can take up their stuff and go away. There are a lot of Arab countries all around. To think that there will be peace is something that will never happen. They don't want peace." She rejects Palestinian claims that the land was inhabited for centuries before the Zionists arrived about 100 years ago. "What was it, a few Bedouin tents?" she asked.

Unlike some settlers who would rather die than be forced off the settlements, the Kleimans say they would leave the Gush Etzion if that's what the government decided. But they would rather more Jews moved to the West Bank.

"This is the way I want my kids to think and to live," Ilana Kleiman said. "This is my legacy to my kids."