Khirbet Khizeh: A Novel

"Fields that would never be harvested, plantations that would never be irrigated, paths that would become desolate. A sense of destruction and worthlessness. An image of thistles and brambles everywhere, a desolate tawniness, a braying wilderness. And already from those fields accusing eyes peered out at you, that silent accusatory look as of a reproachful animal, staring and following you so there was no refuge." -- Yizhar Smilansky, Khirbet KhizehOn the day in 2014 that I read the new English translation of Khirbet Khizeh, Tom Engelhardt published a blog post rewriting recent news articles on the U.S. Senate's torture report as a 2019 Senate report on drone murders. The 2019 "news" media in Tom's believable account is shocked -- shocked, I tell you -- by the rampant murder discovered to have been committed using missiles from drones of all things.The point is that most of what's been discussed as news from the recent torture report, and certainly all of the fundamental moral points -- has been known -- or, more accurately, knowable for years. For the past several years, the U.S. establishment has been repeatedly "banning" torture. It has also been repeatedly discovering the same evidence of torture, over and over again. Leading torturers have gone on television to swear they'd do it all again, while radical activist groups have demanded "investigations."The point is that at some point "truth and reconciliation" is lies and reconciliation -- the lies of pretending that the truth needed to be unearthed, that it was hidden for a time, that the crimes weren't committed in the broad daylight of television spotlights on a sweaty old man assuring us he was about to start working on the dark side.Illustrated by the iNakba app are villages that were destroyed in 1948 to create Israel. Generations of Israelis have grown up not knowing, not wanting to know, pretending not to know, and knowing without confronting the Catastrophe. Israelis are discovering what happened, unburying the hidden truth, filming aging participants' distorted confessions, and hunting out the outlines of disappeared villages on GoogleEarth.But what if the truth was always marching naked down the street with trumpets sounding?In May 1949, Yizhar Smilansky published Khirbet Khizeh, a fictional account of the destruction of a fictional village much like many real ones. Smilansky knew or hoped that he was ahead of his time, so much so that he began the tale by framing it as a recollection from the distant future. The narrator, like the reader, was known by the author to be unable to see for years to come.What would keep the book alive until that distant day?Poetry.It's not a Senate report. Khirbet Khizeh is a work of masterful insight and storytelling that grips you and compels you to enter the experience of its narrator and his companions, as they do what the author had done, as they imitate Nazis before all the ashes had fallen from the skies above the ovens in Europe.This book was planted and grew. It's been taught in Israeli schools. It was a movie on Israeli television in 1978. And now, with a sense that perhaps sleepy eyes are stretching open at long last, the book has had itself translated into the language of the imperial homeland, English.But how could poetry keep heresy alive?Several ways, I think. Absolute failure to pay attention, for one. Think about how literature is taught in many U.S. schools, for example. The ability of people to hear the poetry without the meaning, for another. Think about people singing John Lennon's Imagine without having the slightest idea they've just proposed to abolish religions, nations, and private property, or how people throw around the phrase "peace on earth" in December. Perverse but predictable and perhaps predicted misinterpretation, for another. Think about how viewers of the propaganda film Zero Dark Thirty read accounts of torture, for example -- as a dirty job that needed doing for a greater cause.It's a strain, to me at least, to read Khirbet Khizeh as a celebration of genocide or mass-eviction. And the book not only suffered but also benefitted from being ahead of its time. It pre-existed the mythologies and rhetorical defenses that grew up around the Catastrophe in the decades that followed. When the narrator makes a slight resistance to what he is engaged in, no reader can find anything but humanitarian motivation in his resistance. The idea that this soldier, questioning his fellow soldiers, is engaged in anti-Semitism would literally make no sense. He's revolted by the cruelty, no more no less -- cruelty that every adult and child has to have always known was part of any mass settlement of ancient lands in 1948.When I was a child, in elementary school, I wrote a story about an eviction of a family from its house, complete with plenty of tear-jerking details. As a good American I wrote about British redcoats evicting patriotic U.S. revolutionaries. My teacher suggested to me that I had a talent for writing. But that wasn't writing. Had I written of the Native Americans, the Hawaiians, the Filipinos, the Vietnamese, of Diego Garcia or Vieques or the Marshall Islands or Thule or Okinawa or any of the many places about which silence was expected, that might have been writing.Let us wish no more Khirbet Khizehs on the people of Palestine and many more Khirbet Khizehs on the world.

I am probably the one to blame for this not getting five stars. I just couldn't stomach some of the graphic content. I've never served in a military and reading something like this is such a touching and humanist viewpoint. I would recommend this book for a quick read that feels like you're reading about a lifetime.

Heartfelt story of emotional and moral inner conflict as told in 1949 by an ordinary Israeli soldier of a unit charged w emptying an Arab village of Arab inhabitants who had been on this land, in this village for perhaps tens or hundreds of years... For the sake of creating the new State of Israel... The commentator then shifts his own story (2007) to the Arab villages in the occupied West Bank.. Suggesting that current day action by the Israeli government and settlers is still trying to irradicate the Palestinians to gain more land for Israel..There is always more to the story still unfortunately unfolding btw the Israelis and the Palestinians...Was President Jimmy Carter right or not right when he tried to broker a broad peace btw the 2 warring parties as he prophesied the consequences of continued war... ????

This novel is written in a simple, hauntingly beautiful style and describes one Israeli soldiers misgivings as his unit helps to displace Palestinians from their native village, during the early days of the State of Israel. However, there is nothng simple in the emotions that this story evokes in the reader, who can't help but sympathize with the protagonist's feelings of isolation and despair at the role he feels compelled to play, sending villagers into exile.

What can I say? The issue of Israeli occupation of Palestine has been going on since World war 2 and no one has been able to anything about it. This book highlights one soldier's conscience of the expulsion and exile of innocent Palestinians from their land. You must read it!

Important in an historical context only.

The story of the exile of the Palestinians from their lands in the first of Israel's wars - a process that is ongoing - and a portrayal of ongoing human indifference to the plight of others continues to resonate. It's unfortunate that all the extraordinary flexibility of English cannot duplicate the power of the original Hebrew; its allusions to biblical texts are barely shadowed in translation. When Moshe and Shlomo - Moses and Saul - begin to argue, readers get some hint of what may be going on in the original language - an argument that transcends time, tradition, the particular circumstances of a single - and singular - war.

Rings true and provides a beautifully written account of a certain experience. Painful to read but, like all good literature, makes the reader both care and understand.

perfect