TEL AVIV – In the sunny living room of the Balters' apartment, Minnie is playing solitaire on the couch. Ben, her husband, is outside with some bread soaked in sardine oil for the stray cat who just had kittens. It is the Balters' third generation of stray cats in Israel.

Stray cats, it seems, can spot gentle souls. They home in on the Balters as if by radar, just like the neighbors' children and anybody locked out of his own house at night.

The Balters' house always is open. It always has been, in Freedom, Pa.; in Rochester, N.Y.; and now in Herzlia, a suburb of Tel Aviv.

Minnie is small, fair and blue-eyed, with short white-blond hair. She has a laugh – half giggle, half chuckle – that shakes her whole frame and makes everybody around her smile. She has a few lines in her face from worry. Right now, she is worrying about the cat with the new litter, the upstairs neighbor whose child is due – and the security of Israel."

Her talk is mostly of the last of these worries, and her voice has taken on an unfamiliar edge. That laugh, usually so close to the surface, is not even in sniffing distance now. "If they give up the West Bank," she says, looking up from her cats, "it'll mean the death of Israel."

Minnie and Ben married when they were 20. She says they fell in love when they were 11, growing up together in western Pennsylvania's Beaver Valley. Now, in Tel Aviv, approaching their 47th wedding anniversary, they finish each other's sentences and start each other's stories.

Ben is big and loose-framed, with a thousand wrinkles from smiles and a gravelly warm voice made specially for telling bedtime stories to children. He has found and fed the mother cat.

Now he walks in on a discussion of Israel's attack on the Palestinians in Lebanon. His voice, too, seems unfamiliar.

"How do you treat mad dogs?" he asks. "The solution is just to kill as many as you can."

Back in Rochester, nine or 10 years ago, the Balters were known as "peaceniks."  There were couples, among their old circle, who edged the Balters off guest lists because of their early, active, unpopular opposition to the war in Vietnam.

"Like some kind of nutsy Quakers," one of their old friends used to say.

The Balters made trips across the Canadian border to help draft dodgers and deserters who fled north. Ben studied Chinese history. They became an FBI file. They marched,
they met, they petitioned – against the war, against wars, against weapons.

Now, after six years in Herzlia, something deep has changed. The stray animals still come around. The neighbors' children still barge in and clamber onto Ben's lap as if by natural right.

But the Balters cheered when Israeli troops rumbled into southern Lebanon last month. They want the Israeli army in control of the West Bank territory even if it sinks the current peace negotiations with Egypt's President Anwar Sadat.

"Sadat doesn't want peace," Ben says. "He wants everything he couldn't get with war just by saying he wants peace. The Arabs just want the West Bank to use as a foothold to destroy Israel.

"It's not enough to just want peace. You have to think of security."

Security. The word can stop arguments, silence most complaints, explain the inexplicable and justify almost anything.

Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister, often is criticized in the West for returning again and again to the litany of security he recites in justification for his stance in the maneuvering toward a Mideast peace.

But Begin's refrain does not seem, here, to be a bargaining trick, as Sadat or Begin's American critics suggest. It is a reflection of a need so palpable here, a value so universal, that it makes the American need for "success" seem mild.

The moment the visitor arrives, sometimes sooner, real or imagined security measures crowd in from every side.