To Live in Peace by Rosemary Friedman Page A

properties which happened, by chance, to bejust round the corner from Winnington Road, or sent estate agent’s details through the post of “suitable” residences and “convenient” semi-detacheds. Rachel, whose plans did not include three-bedroomed domesticity, threw the missives into the waste-paper basket without glancing at them, but sometimes she saw Patrick looking at her as if he were torn.
    They had decided before they were married – theirs was to be a way of life which eschewed the bourgeois values in which they had both been reared. Watching Patrick engaged in conversation with old Mrs Klopman, Rachel knew that she was ensconced in the camp of the enemy and that it was going to be an uphill task. It was strange how she had been duped. Struggling to release herself from her own parental stranglehold, she thought she had found in Patrick a like-minded spirit whose thirst for independence matched her own, but it had been all talk. She wondered if she was going to succeed in prising him from his mother when she had not even managed to extricate his shirts.
    Her sister Carol (who was deep in conversation with Herbert, Rachel would not have been surprised if he was telling her another joke) married to Alec, who had a country practice, represented the epitome of the lifestyle to which Rachel had been determined she would not subscribe. With lives circumscribed by the constraints of their religion, horizons bounded by the next festival or communal activity, what margin was there for growth?
    “Found anything yet?” Hettie asked Patrick. She meant a house.
    “I haven’t had time.” Patrick addressed his plate.
    “We haven’t been looking,” Rachel said.
    “You haven’t got long.” Hettie meant before the baby. “How are your renovations going?” she said pointedly to Carol.
    “It’s still at the demolition stage,” Carol said of the Queen Anne House. “Another few weeks and it should be taking shape.”
    “Six bedrooms, isn’t it?” Hettie said pointedly. “A guest suite on the top floor for your mother when she wants to stay, a nursery for the new baby, and a great big garden for the children.”
    “Children need a garden,” old Mrs Klopman said. “I remember Patrick…”
    “Did anyone hear the news?” Rachel said, changing the subject.
    “The Israelis have bulldozed Arab houses,” Hettie said, successfully deflected from the topic of Carol’s new home, “I saw it on the six o’clock news.”
    “To punish terrorists and their collaborators,” Rachel said, “which is exactly what the British did during the Mandate.”
    “What annoys me,” Herbert said, “is that the whole meshugasse is described in Arab terms.”
    “Herbert’s very touchy,” old Mrs Klopman said.
    “They will talk about PLO ‘guerillas’…”
    “For the love of God, Herbert, what are they then?”
    “Terrorists. Murderers. Take Judea and Samaria,” Herbert warmed to his theme, “inaccurately referred to as the ‘West Bank’…”
    “The Arabs don’t want a state on the West Bank,” Rachel said, “they want to eat us up alive!”
    “If your friend Begin had his way,” Patrick said, “Israel will subject the Arabs on the West Bank…” he looked at his father “…all right, Judea and Samaria, to discrimination, as aliens, in a territory where many of them have lived for generations.”
    “If a state created by newcomers on land where there is already a long settled population is illegitimate,” Rachel said, “then most nation states are illegitimate. Look at America, look at…”
    “The land was promised,” Herbert said, interrupting. “And the settlers are there as proof of that promise.”
    “The Bible also says that we must treat the alien and the stranger with kindness and sympathy,” Carol ventured. She was not well versed in the political argument but felt somehow that the activities of Menachem Begin, approved of by her sister Rachel, were not in accordance with the spirit of