Khirbet Khizeh

Writing under the pen name of S. Yizhar, Yizhar Smilansky’s historical novel, Khirbet Khizeh (1949), deals with events that occurred during the Israeli War of Independence when inhabitants of Arab villages were expelled.

The story begins with an unnamed narrator telling the reader that “it all happened a long time ago.” While serving as a soldier, he arrived at the village of Khirbet Khizeh along with the rest of his unit. He confesses he is uncertain how to begin his tale, noting how the unit had had to wait for orders once they had deployed their equipment. Knowing how to wait better than most people, the soldiers stretch out to get some rest before orders finally come in. He analyzes the different kinds of waiting that soldiers experience and how they deal with its corrosive effects, pointing out that it can be demoralizing for soldiers. This is especially true of their current duty, which consists of arriving at Arab villages that have been abandoned—conquered by the Israelis—and then waiting and watching to see if anything happens. The stink from these villages is terrible because of the food left abandoned on tables and other supplies left behind.

There are only five or six soldiers in the unit, led by an officer named Moishe. As they wait, they discuss women, their families, and other trivial matters and play some games with each other. The narrator observes they are boyish and innocent, well fed and recently showered, young men in the peak of health. They know the village of Khirbet Khizeh is largely empty, that most of the able-bodied men and women have left and crossed over the newly established border. Someone finds an orange tree and the soldiers sit around eating oranges.



The soldiers finally receive their orders. The village is to be evacuated and destroyed to discourage the residents from returning once the army has left the area. They are to burn the buildings that will burn and blow up the stone structures using explosives. They are to put the remaining population—mainly the elderly and invalids—onto trucks and drive them across the new border into what is their new legally-recognized country.

The soldiers transform into a more callous and unfeeling persona, although not exactly cruel. They pursue their orders with simple, straightforward energy. All of the residents are forced out of their homes, and their possessions are dumped in the middle of the village. While some of the residents complain or protest, regarding their fate as inevitable, they are mostly cooperative and passive, obeying orders. He reflects on how the village will be transformed into a collection of resources no longer used—water no longer pumped, fields no longer cultivated.

The narrator has a moment of hesitation as he considers what they are doing an act of desecration; he temporarily refuses to obey orders. Moishe tells him it will be all right because new Jewish immigrants will come and work the land and rebuild the houses; the village won’t be left abandoned and useless. The narrator still resists, internally, telling himself that the village is not theirs to take. He contemplates the irony of Jewish soldiers—a people so often forced into exile—forcing another group of people into similar exile. His fellow soldiers offer equivocations, reasoning that they are really just transporting these people to ‛their’ country, and thus they are actually doing them a favor, in a sense. Others point out that this is a war, after all, and that the Arabs had done the same to Jews, and worse. However, not able to overcome his sense of guilt over inflicting this exile on these poor, sad, weak people, the narrator rejects their arguments.



The villagers are lined up and any possessions they attempt to hang onto are roughly taken from them, even the blankets they wrap around themselves to keep warm. They are marched through a puddle towards the trucks, getting dirty and wet in a final act of callous disregard. The stone buildings are wired with explosives and the other structures are set on fire as the trucks pull away, carrying the last remnants of the village to the nearby border. The narrator condemns himself for being timid about obeying orders, as if he has any moral superiority to the rest of the soldiers. He castigates himself as just as bad as them and contemplates the destruction of the village, which seems senseless.

In the end, the village is reduced to a few columns of smoke and the remnants of a community. The soldiers, tired and bored, assemble and begin to talk about what they will eat for dinner; the narrator knows they will go home and become boys again, innocent and unaffected.