eBook Khirbet Khizeh download

This is an exceptional, short novel. Written in Hebrew and wonderfully translated. The writing is sparse and emotionally powerful. Shortly before the establishment of the State of Israel, young Jewish paramilitary groups roamed the countryside of what would become Israel forcing Palestinian residents out of their villages, clearing the land for settlement. This novel, written in 1949, is a story of moral ambiguity, contrasting the excitement of the forthcoming Jewish state with moral qualms about the destruction of the livelihoods and lives of longstanding residents. I recommend it as great literature and as a slim corrective to the usual depiction of the events surrounding the forming of the State of Israel.

Read this if you think you understand anything at all about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, but still have an open mind.

Important historical accounting in novel form.

This writer was already reknowned when he wrote this book - his novel "The Days of Ziklag" was greeted as a masterpiece when it came out. This book is a small vignette in sparkling language both Biblical and demotic. The author voices his doubts and foreboding, not about the lofty notions of Zionism but how the taking of the land actually was carried out. He also speaks lyrically of the beauty of the land. He makes it clear that the soldiers look down on the people they are displacing, but otherwise it would be unbearable to carry out their orders. They disdain the Palestinian villagers for not fighting back; ironically this same disdain was displayed toward those who survived the concentration camps who came to replace those villagers.
It is interesting to note that this book, very popular when it came out, was high school reading in Israel beginning in 1964. However, this history seems less familiar to many Americans.

This is a really important book for Israeli-Palestinian history. So much of what happened in 1948 is contested and really unknown. This book sheds light on a lot of what for the most part was ignored in Israeli cultural texts from the 40s and 50s.

We bought this book in Tel Aviv in January 2013, just days after viewing the exhibit and film "Alone on the Walls" about the heroic but ultimately failed struggle of residents of Jerusalem's Jewish Quarter against the assault by overwhelming forces of the Arab Legion and other Arab armies. A few dozen young men with small arms and lots of ingenuity, aided by women, children and the elderly, managed to hold off the siege for 150 days, from December 1947 to final surrender in May 1948. It is a powerful, moving story, documented by a photojournalist who, in disguise, accompanied the Jordanian troops and was able to get close to the attackers and, after the defeat, to the defeated.

But the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, like all wars, was morally complicated. This famous book by a prolific and highly respected Israeli novelist probes actions of Israeli forces that cannot inspire pride, and that help explain the deep pain and anger of Palestinians today.

Published (in Hebrew) in 1949, just months after the events it describes, this was the first novel to (as the author himself described it years later) "[lay] bare the original sin of the State of Israel": the forcible, violent expulsion, killing, and razing of the homes of Palestinian villagers whose ancestral lands happened to fall on the Israeli side of the 1948 partition -- the expulsion that Palestinians remember as the Nakba or "Catastrophe." Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky) was a Sabra, born in Eretz Yisrael (in Rehovot) in 1916, 31 years before there was a state of Israel. He writes with an understanding of his Israeli character's psychology from the inside, which makes his portrait of a young Israeli soldier sharply, shudderingly convincing. The narrator is a sympathetic, unaggressive boy who would much rather be at home with his mom but has answered the call of duty -- and is dismayed to realize that his squad's mission is what we would now call "ethnic cleansing". The IDF detail assigned to erase the village of Khirbet Khizeh in the 1948 war is told thatthey are acting in self-defense, that the villagers are all potential terrorists. But as the day of shooting at and sometimes killing fleeing men, mindlessly slaughtering farm animals, terrorizing women, children and old men too infirm to run, and blowing up houses continues, with no sign of an enemy weapon or hostile reaction anywhere, the soldier wonders what in his God's name he and his fellows are doing if not recreating the Jews' own history of exile.

"All at once everything seemed to mean something different, more precisely exile. This was exile. This was what exile was like. This was what exile looked like . . ."

But the young soldier does not bring himself to resist an order, and he does not dare to appear soft or Arab-loving to his comrades, so ever more reluctantly he continues with his squad until the village and its lives are totally destroyed. But his shame continues to haunt him. The book was a best-seller in Israel when re-issued in 1964 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. It reads brilliantly in this translation by Nicholas de Lange; it must be wonderful in Hebrew.

What can a novel tell us about history? Back when Khirbet Khizeh was published, in 1949, there was little documentation on the expulsion of Arab Palestinians from their homes by the Haganah (later IDF, or Israel Defense Forces). S. Yizhar instead supplied the characters and narrative in part to drive a discussion of the topic when serious historians had little to say. However, since the archives were opened in the late 1980s, the New Historians have broken the silence that pervaded what the Palestinians call al-nakba.

Khirbet Khizeh remains important, though in some ways, for different reasons. First, it helps humanize the events of the expulsion as no history can. Second, the reaction to the book in Israel over the years is a telling indicator of Israeli attitudes towards expulsion, as Anita Shapira notes ("Hirbet Hizah: Between Remembering and Forgetting," in Benny Morris, ed., Making Israel (Ann Arbor, 2007), pp. 81-123). Finally, for those not familiar with the extensive history of 1948, it tells them that an expulsion did occur.

Unanswered in the book, however, is whether Khirbet Khizeh, a fictional town, was representative of a broader Israeli policy of expulsion or an exception. Yizhar himself argued that the eponymous village was not a metaphor for the Land of Israel, but given the evidence that has emerged since the late 1980s, a reader may interpret things differently.