Ready to Explode

December 9, 2009

In just over a hundred pages, S. Yizhar’s Khirbet Khizeh offers a stunning revelation of the way Palestinians were treated during the war of 1948. Sadly, reading these words is even more painful today than it was in 1949 when the novel was first published in Israel. Perhaps this explains why, to our shame, it took 60 years to be translated into English—despite the fact that it is an optional part of the standard curriculum in Israeli high schools.

For Khirbet Khizeh bears testimony to a truth we either vehemently deny or would rather forget: the displacement and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and villages by Israeli soldiers during the 1948 war. Still worse, it remains a truth that we refuse to face up to or take steps to redress. Perhaps this English edition, sensitively translated by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck, will serve as a cautionary tale, lest we continue to repeat the same mistakes of the past. In a moving afterword called “Back to Khirbet Khizeh”, David Shulman, who now rereads the work 40 years later, describes the difficulties faced by the translators:

“I had forgotten the tough, supple feel of Yizhar’s Hebrew … . No other Hebrew prose is remotely like it. Today it’s a vanished language, this experimental mélange of wild, lucid lyricism, often dark and menacing, pointed biblical illusions that go off like hand grenades in the midst of the meandering, stream-of-consciousness syntax, and the bizarre, somewhat stiff colloquial speech of his tormented protagonists. Modern Hebrew was much younger then, sixty years ago, but haunted, of course, like everything written in this language, by the grisly and compelling ghosts of the distant past.”

S. Yizhar, the pen name of Yizhar Smilansky, was born in Rehovot, Palestine, in 1916. He was a longtime member of the Knesset for the Mapai [Labor] party. His first project as a writer was to recount the tragic events that he had witnessed as an intelligence officer in the Israeli army in 1948. Khirbet Khizeh, together with his other literary masterpiece, The Days of Tziklag (also about the 1948 war), account for his early success. In 1959, Yizhar won the Israel Prize, handed out by the state and regarded as Israel’s highest honor, and then wrote nothing until 1992, when he began publishing the first of three autobiographical novels. He died in 2006.

The novella is narrated by an unnamed soldier who confesses at the outset that, though haunted by what he had done a long time ago, he “could no longer hold back.”

His unit is responsible for removing all the Arabs left in the small village of Khirbet Khizeh. Their orders are straightforward and clear: “assemble the inhabitants of the area extending from point X to point Y — load them onto transports, and convey them across our lines; blow up the stone houses, and burn the huts; detain the youths and the suspects, and clear the area of ‘hostile forces.’”

But is it that simple? Can one “burn-blow up-imprison-load-convey” … “with such courtesy” … [that] “this would be a sign of a wind of change, of decent upbringing, and, perhaps, even of the Jewish soul, the great Jewish soul”? The story revolves around this moral paradox and tension: Can Jews do such things to other human beings, given what Jews have endured for centuries and given what they carry in their collective memory?

From the start Moishe, the company commander, justifies the action in the expected fashion: the inhabitants of this village were “a band of ruffians, who gave succor to the enemy, and were ready for any mischief should the opportunity arise.”

Yet the innocence of the village is everywhere apparent to soldiers sent to pacify and evict its population: “[W]hen we fixed our sights upon those few houses on the flanks of that unobtrusive hill, … the well-tended gardens, and a scattering of wells, we saw that this whole Khirbet Khizeh presented no problem … .”

Through a series of encounters, the soldiers try to make sense of what they are doing. But ultimately all the arguments fall apart in the face of the helpless and pathetic people they are preparing to evacuate.

They see a woman holding the hand of a child about seven years old; the seeds of future hatred and uprisings are being sown right before their eyes:

There was something special about her. She seemed stern, self-controlled, austere in her sorrow… . Exalted in their pain and sorrow above our—wicked—existence they went on their way and we could see how something was happening in the heart of the boy, something that, when he grew up, could only become a viper inside him, that same thing that was now the weeping of a helpless child.

Moishe offers one last justification: “Immigrants of ours will come to this Khirbet what’s-its-name, you hear me, and they’ll take this land and work it and it’ll be beautiful here!”

This is the last straw:

Of course. Absolutely. Why hadn’t I realized it from the outset? Our very own Khirbet Khizeh. Questions of housing, and problems of absorption… . We’d open a cooperative store, establish a school, maybe even a synagogue… . Long live Hebrew Khizeh!

A silence begins to fall upon the village. Thoughts of a future Hebrew Khizeh only bring more anger, more confusion, and a biblical image alluding to Psalm 1:3: “A single day of discomfort and then our people would strike root here for many years. Like a tree planted by streams of water. Yes… . Certainly, wasn’t it our right? Hadn’t we conquered it today?”

Now the narrator remembers the woman and her child leaving the village:

I had a single, set idea, like a hammered nail, that I could never be reconciled to anything, so long as the tears of a weeping child still glistened as he walked with his mother … on his way into exile, bearing with him a roar of injustice and such a scream that—it was impossible that no one in the world would gather that scream in when the moment came.

There is nothing left to say. The trucks are leaving, one by one. Soon it would all be a distant memory, “shameful but fading fast.” Calm and silence gradually fill the valley. Somebody starts talking about supper. Is it possible that life is returning to normal?

Recalling the moving scene in Genesis describing the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the story ends on a troubling note, suggesting that no one will ever understand what is happening in this village and that only God can weigh the evidence and reveal the crime:

All around silence was falling, and very soon it would close upon the last circle. And when silence had closed in on everything and no man disturbed the stillness, which yearned noiselessly for what was beyond silence—then God would come forth and descend to roam the valley, and see whether all was according to the cry that had reached him.

Yizhar is here re-envisioning Genesis 18:20-21: “Then YHVH said, ‘The outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their offense so grave. I must go down and see whether their actions are like the outcry [ha’ke’tza’akatah] that has reached me, and if not, I will know.’”

The very last word of Khirbet Khizeh recalls this ambiguous, unresolved state of affairs—ha’ke’tza’akatah, literally ‘like the cry of it’. This is the festering sore, the open wound that hangs over Israel’s future. Only YHVH, the compassionate and merciful God, can know whose cry deserves to be heard. Until then, we too remain in exile even as we plant trees, build homes, and raise families in our ancient homeland.

Khirbet Khizeh is available from Ibis Editions

Ready to Explode

David Brusin

Arts and Culture