Khirbet Khizeh

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The book doesn't leave with you a self-righteous sense of indignation. For after all that is what allows such crimes to happen. This is something that Yizhar also touches on: The roles are easily exchanged and it is only the circumstances that place one behind the gun and the other before it. I end the book with great respect for Yizhar as a writer, and only wish I could read it in the original Hebrew the afterward gives some hints at what I missed in the translated text , but also for him as a man with the courage not to accept the myth of one's purity. Yizhar real name Yizhar Smilansky published this short book in The plot takes place during the expulsions and operations of , when soldiers were forcing Palestinian occupants of villages and reshaping the human geography of the territory under their control.

Khirbet Khizeh is the name of one such village which the protagonist visits with his military unit and expels its inhabitants. The book is short, but packs an incredible punch. It's remarkable, moreover, that Yi Extraordinary. It's remarkable, moreover, that Yizhar manages to sound his cry of injustice without lapsing into polemic.

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The edition of the book that I read closes with a strong afterword by David Shulman , who contextualises the original work and connects it to the present moment. I had opportunity to think about this book more overnight, and also learnt about the concept of "shooting and weeping", of which Yizhar is supposedly a proto-example. Responses to this book can and should be more complex than the initial emotional reaction. Indeed, the protagonist has an internal struggle and regrets about the operations which he is part of, but he participates in them nonetheless.

Aug 06, Deborah Feingold rated it it was amazing Shelves: Painstaking and painful story describing the forced removal of Palestinians from their land in Israel's War of Independence. Reminiscent of Tim O'Brien in its humanization of the "enemy. Author unflinchingly describes brutality of dispossession and like all good war stories makes clear the dehumanization that occurs to oppressor and oppressed alike.

Brave account Painstaking and painful story describing the forced removal of Palestinians from their land in Israel's War of Independence. Brave account that pretty much avoids the how and why those rationalizations we arrive to that point and instead focuses on the disastrous and tragic impact and hints presciently at the future consequences on those caught in the middle of cataclysmic events.

Aug 25, M Wiegers rated it it was amazing. Khirbet Khizeh is a short novel written by a former Israeli intelligence officer, personalizing the expulsion of the residents of a Palestinian village in Timely, in part for its ability to dramatize the rationalizations individuals contrive in order to allow them to perform acts of brutality and violence. Ibis Editions continues to set a high standard for publishing with moral urgency.

Mar 12, Marwan Asmar marked it as to-read. A review from the Guardian Newspaper http: It is published by Granta this month in its first full English translation, first issued by Adina Hoffman for Ibis editions in Jerusalem in Khirbet Khizeh tells the story of the expulsion of Palestinian villagers from their home and land during the war that immediately followed the founding of the Israeli state: By the end of it, , Palestinians had become refugees.

This story, this moment, is, to say the least, still controversial. In July , Israel's education ministry announced that the term nakba, introduced two years previously into Palestinian-Israeli textbooks, was to be removed on the grounds that its use was tantamount to spreading propaganda against Israel.

Khirbet Khizeh

In May last year, a law was passed — widely termed the "Nakba Law" — that withdraws government funding from any group judged to be "acting against the principles of the country", which includes the commemoration of the nakba. The law effectively criminalises the right of the Palestinian people to remember.

Khirbet Khizeh by S Yizhar, translated by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck Buy it from the Guardian bookshopSearch the Guardian bookshop Renowned for many years as the only tale in Israeli literature to tell the story of the expulsion, Khirbet Khizeh also owes its power and status to the way that it recounts the resistance to memory which this dark episode of Israeli history will provoke in the nation's consciousness: I sought to drown it out with the din of passing time, to diminish its value, to blunt its edge with the rush of daily life.

But it is as if, in the charged moment of writing, he already saw that his task was to rescue this history from oblivion. Unlike the other soldiers in his unit, the narrator knows that this story is not going to go away. As he walks through the desolate Palestinian landscape, his soldier companion exults in the emptiness which he sees as proof of the superiority of the Zionist pioneers: Our old-timers used to break their backs for any strip of land, and today we just walk in and take it!

He was born to Russian immigrants in in Rehovot, in what was then Ottoman Palestine. His uncle and mentor, Moshe Smilansky, was an agricultural pioneer. Yizhar was therefore a sabra, part of the new generation, untainted by exile, who bore on their shoulders the expectation of the new nation waiting to be born. It is a burden that Yizhar repeatedly refuses — or rather finds himself unable — to bear: It was a central tenet of Zionist belief that the Jews were returning to their ancestral home; Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel, only just lost his struggle to have the Balfour Declaration refer to the right of the Jewish people to "reconstitute" their homeland in Palestine.

Yizhar's vision is oblique in Khirbet Khizeh, as it is in another famous story, "The Prisoner", in his magnum opus Days of Tziglak, which follows a battalion during the war, as well as in the three-part memoir that started to appear in after a literary silence of nearly 30 years. He is the dissident chronicler of his nation. He was also a member of the Knesset from In , he had been actively engaged in the offensive against Egypt — another story, "Midnight Convoy", is a tribute to the soldiers that enters exuberantly into the drama of trying to get supplies past the enemy to an army under siege.

Yizhar therefore occupies both sides of the divide which he charts with such brilliance in his writing. Khirbet Khizeh is the story which, with the least ambivalence, offers to official Zionist history its strongest, unanswerable, counterpoint. The translation is long overdue. In lyrical, haunting prose — evocatively rendered into English by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck — the narrator describes what was done to the Palestinians in As the story builds to its climax, the writing at times is paced and slow, such as when the soldiers languish and wait; then it suddenly erupts, like the exploded stone house of a woman who "leapt up, burst into wild howling and started to run in that direction, holding a baby in her arms, while another wretched child, who could already stand, clutched the hem of her dress, and she screamed, pointed, talked, and choked".

All at once she understands "that it wasn't just about waiting under the sycamore trees to hear what the Jews wanted and then to go home, but that her home and her world had come to a full stop, and everything had turned dark and was collapsing; suddenly she had grasped something inconceivable, terrible, incredible, standing directly before her, real and cruel, body to body, and there was no going back".

By recounting this crisis from inside her mind, Yizhar dismantles at a stroke the poisoned rhetoric of enmity, the image of the Palestinians as unknowable, distant, threatening. You cannot read Khirbet Khizeh without experiencing — "body to body" — as a tragedy for the Palestinians. In its most unsettling and best-known moment — the only section of the novella previously translated into English — the narrator is struck "like lightning" by the analogy between the treatment being meted out by the army to the Palestinians, huddling together on the point of departure, and the history of the Jews: All at once everything seemed to mean something different, more precisely exile.

This was what exile was like. This was what exile looked like. I have never been in the Diaspora — I said to myself — I had never known what it was like. Our nation's protest to the world: It had entered me, apparently, with my mother's milk. What, in fact, had we perpetrated here today? Later, the narrator pushes the analogy even further: We were the masters now.

And in a later edition of the story, a sentence at the end of the passage underlines the responsibility of the soldier as a Jew: As David Shulman remarks in his afterword to the new edition, Yizhar is well known for such allusions. This one is particularly shocking. He seems to be suggesting that Israel has usurped the voice of God by inscribing its national plaint into the minds of its subjects in the same way that God issues his spiritual injunction to his people.

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Yizhar's offence is therefore double — first to imply that the Jews are perpetrating against the Palestinians the cruelties of their own history, and that the nation is invoking divine sanction in order to do so. When the story was published in , the controversy it provoked was intense — mainly among an older generation who refused to accept that the story had any bearing on the conduct of the war, or if it did, insisting that the policy was justified, or that the narrator's pained consciousness demonstrated that this generation of Israeli soldiers had not been taught to hate the Arab enemy enough.

More than one of these criticisms is pre-empted by the story itself, as the narrator tears at his own conscience: Not all the responses were hostile. For one Israeli commentator, the story was true and demonstrated the cruel existential choice presented to the Jewish people by the war. One Arab critic pointed to the story as indicating the possibility of real understanding between the two peoples and hence of peace. In her lengthy account of these disputes, Anita Shapira has suggested that the soldiers themselves were more or less silent in the early debate — as if the victory, which was above all their victory, had turned into a sore too painful to contemplate.

Thirty years later, in the aftermath of a state ban on the screening of a film of the novella on national TV, one of these soldiers, Ephraim Kleiman, stepped forward to claim that every soldier will have recognised the truth of the story, that every soldier has his own personal "Khirbet Khizeh". By then the dispute had become more overtly political.

Between the ban and its subsequent overturning, Likud was elected and a rightwing government came to power. The story was now seen as damaging Israel's image of itself. Yizhar himself had stated that the story was fiction. But in response to the banning of the film, in a article published in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharanot, he insisted that, while not necessarily representing a "totality of events", it was true: We should be wary, however, of seeing this fact as a "tribute to an open society", as Ian McEwan suggested in his Jerusalem prize acceptance speech last month.

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Most often it is elevated to the status of a universal moral tale, or taken as evidence of the superior ethics of an army so willing to examine and expose itself the nation's guilt as the key to its redemption. The stress on the agony of Israeli conscience usurps the suffering of the Palestinians. A proposal in the s that the story be included in the new civics class, which would have ensured that it was discussed as history, was never implemented. In the aftermath of the war that led to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Yizhar returned to his story in an essay, "Re: The Poets of Annexation".

Because you don't get a country by means of weapons. Any such acquisition is unjust. Eindelijk weer eens 5 sterren Gruwelijke daden adembenemend mooi beschrijven, het is weinigen gegeven. Van een onwerkelijke schoonheid, die lang zal nazinderen, en tot herlezen dwingt Published in Hebrew in , just months after the events it describes, this was the first novel to as the author himself put it "[lay] bare the original sin of the State of Israel": The IDF detail assigned to erase the village of Khirbet Khizeh in the war is supposed to believe that they are acting in self-defense, that the villagers are all potential terrorists.

But as the day of shooting at fleeing men, killing farm animals, terrorizing women, children and old men to infirm to run, and blowing up houses continues, with no sign of an enemy weapon anywhere, the soldier wonders what in his God's name they are doing if not recreating the Jews' own history of exile. But his shame continues to haunt him. The book was a best-seller in Israel when re-issued in and was for a time required reading in high schools. Its merit is not merely its denunciation of "the original sin" but also its exquisite description of landscape, people, sensations and the doubts of the young soldier.

De soldaten kletsen, grappen en zingen. De jongens zijn uitgelaten. De missie laat nochtans geen twijfel mogelijk. De soldaten moeten de bewoners van punt x tot aan punt y verzamelen, hen op wagens laden en hen voorbij de eigen linies transporteren, de stenen huizen opblazen en de lemen hutten verbranden, de jongeren en de verdachten gevangen nemen, het gebied zuiveren van vijandige elementen. De opdracht dient stipt en vastberaden uitgevoerd te worden.

Yizhar, zelf jong soldaat, neemt eerst enthousiast deel. En dan slaat de twijfel toe: Deze novelle verscheen voor het eerst in , net na de Nakba, en veroorzaakte grote onrust. Jan 24, Lis rated it it was amazing Shelves: Dec 22, Kathlyn rated it really liked it Shelves: A novella written by one of those involved in the '48 ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Poignant reading, particularly in the light of what has subsequently happened to the moral conscience of Israel.

Yizhar's prose-lyricism made this book a defining start to my year. The portrait of Israeli soldiers before and during an expulsion of Palestinians might have fallen to political idealism and moralistic preaching, but the way in which this tale is written presents a fleshier, more pained experience. Yizhar is able to make that which is dust into flesh, with landscapes that reflect the pain and destruction inflicted upon its inhabitants. The torment of the inhabitants is understood through the S.

The torment of the inhabitants is understood through the rote mechanization seen in the end of the war. People became prisoners, and, in some people's eyes, lost their humanity. I do not claim to know the depth of poetry that exists in the original, and I admit ignorance to the specificity of religious allusion, but the broader historical and religious undertones exist quite powerfully in this English language translations poesis. This rendering of Khirbet Khizeh into English, as well as the afterword providing linguistic analysis and historical context of the original, resonated with me.

More than any other discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts has. A conflicting and provocative read, I suspect I will be drawn back to this book and that it will occupy a place amongst some of my favorite books. Feb 12, Joe Ruvido rated it it was amazing. I picked the book up because it was referenced in a New Yorker article about a controversial Israeli Netflix show that is causing a similar controversy to that of Khirbet Khizeh, whose made-for-TV movie was nearly blocked from the air by the Israeli Knesset. Though I finished the book some 70 years and half a world away from its occurrence, the intensity of the story was such that it could have been a BBC radio report from the West Bank that I heard just this morning.

Written in May , one year after the Nakba, this account by an Israeli soldier is a truly remarkable account. It details some of the horrors that took place, but I find it more remarkable for the reflections of S. Perhaps one of the most profound reflections comes late in the book, when he says: All at once everything seemed to mean something different, more precisely: This was what exile looked l Written in May , one year after the Nakba, this account by an Israeli soldier is a truly remarkable account.

I very much recommend this book to others. Apr 25, Akin rated it liked it Shelves: The principal strengths of this novella lie outside the book itself, relating more to the context and percipience.

It is good for what it is, as a work of literature: As it happens, I think this moral response is the correct one. War is bad, and soldiers grow callused. I already knew that. It's not KK, it's me: That it is "still-shockingly wise," as the blurb suggests, is a little bit much. Turns out the Israeli occupation wasn't and isn't all that noble a thing.

The prose was decent, but not so good that it took me away from the obviousness of the rest of the book. I'm glad this was written, that it's still in print, and that people are reading it. But I think I just expected too much. The year of the Nakba the cataclysm , , saw a million Palestinians dispossessed of their homes and land and the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages.

The novella describes the eviction of the Palestinian inhabitants of a village and the destruction of their homes. The hauntingly lyrical language describes a beautiful land and portrays the feelings of hopelessness and torn loyalties of the narrator. The villagers await their fate with increasing despair and desperation as they realise they will never be allowed to return to their land and homes.

Exile is a powerful and politically loaded term, bringing to mind both the Holocaust and the justification for the state of Israel, which is that the Jewish people had lived in exile for two thousand years. What, in fact, had we perpetrated here today? Some have argued that it shows the compassion of the Israeli army. It brings home to the reader the real cost of the creation of the state of Israel.

The human tragedy perpetuated lives with the reader long after the book is finished. The political relevance of the book remains contemporary. The illegal settlements continue to be built, the bombs rain down over Gaza and the expelled Palestinians remain in refugee camps far from lands they farmed for generations. In , 10, Palestinians were made homeless after the IDF destroyed 1, homes.

In the war on Gaza in the homes of , people were damaged.

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