Yizhar, S. Khirbet Khizeh: A Novel.

Yizhar’s Khirbet Khizeh is the canonical account, from an Israeli perspective, of the expulsion of an Arab village during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Though a work of historical fiction, the novel and its reception speak to debates around atrocities perpetrated in that war. Originally published in 1949, the novel has found commercial and critical success and was incorporated into the educational curriculum in Israel, but has also been the subject of fierce debate, including attempts to ban it (Ginsburg, Joffe). It first appeared in English in 2008.

Though first published only shortly after the war, the novel is framed as the much-later recollections by the narrator, a former Israeli soldier, of events which had “haunted [him] ever since” (3).  His meditations on the effect of those memories on him are interspersed in a chronicle of the expulsion of Palestinians from a village by Israeli soldiers over a single day. In the course of that day, the narrator begins processing what he sees and participates in: amidst violence and destruction, most soldiers do not protest or seem to have qualms about their actions, while the narrator registers discomfort but does little by way of attempting to stop what he witnesses. 

Crucially, in this account of the violence which came with the creation of a Jewish state, Yizhar implicitly draws a comparison between Jewish and Palestinian experiences of exile, as the narrator realizes that what he is witnessing the start of something like the exile of which he had been told: “Something struck me like lightning. All at once everything seemed to mean something different, more precisely: exile. This was exile. This is what exile was like. This was what exile looked like” (Yizhar 100). Further, and prophetically for the time that it was written, the novel also contains meditations on how the the Israeli perpetration of Palestinian exile would come to be remembered–or rather, not remembered– as the narrator wonders “[w]ho, then, would ever imagine that once there had been some Khirbet Khizeh that we emptied out and took for ourselves” (104).

  Indeed, much analysis of the novel has been interested in how Israeli-perpetrated violence is remembered, or not. Anita Shapira focuses on developments in the reception of Khirbet Khizeh, asserting that they speak to an oscillation between remembering and forgetting over time, while Gil Hochberg situates the novel as part of what she identifies as a “poetics of haunting” in Hebrew Israeli literature. Future study might more explicitly situate Khirbet Khizeh within the theoretical framework of perpetrator studies.

Cited: Ginsburg, Shai. “S. Yizhar’s Khirbet Khizeh and the Rhetoric of Conflict.” Jewish Rhetorics: History, Theory, Practice (2014): 164-79.

Hochberg, Gil. “A Poetics of Haunting: From Yizhar’s Hirbeh to Yehoshua’s Ruins to Koren’s Crypts.” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 18.3 (2012): 55-69.

Joffe, Lawrence. “Yizhar Smilansky.” The Guardian, 23 Aug. 2006, www.theguardian.com/news/2006/aug/24/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries. 

Shapira, Anita. “Hirbet Hizah: between remembrance and forgetting.” Jewish Social Studies 7.1 (2000): 1-62.

Yizhar, S. Khirbet Khizeh: A Novel. Macmillan, 2014.

Author of this entry: Hannah Jakobsen

Yizhar, S. Khirbet Khizeh: A Novel. Macmillan, 2014.