Khirbet Khizeh

"Khirbet Khizeh by S Yizhar and the final book on the list both come from the same people, and I’ll explain why in a bit. Khirbet Khizeh is an interesting book because it’s a very, very short novel – a long short story really – written by this guy who was an intelligence officer in the fledgling Israeli army. The book’s told from the point of view of a soldier in this army just after the Israeli war of independence, as the Israelis call it, has finished. And he and his squad have been detailed to go and ethnically cleanse a Palestinian village which has remained inside Israeli territory. He tells how they’re wandering around on this lovely day and the sun is shining and it’s idyllic. And they go into this village, round up the Palestinians and put them on trucks and send them away to the border to the West Bank, where Jordan is in control. The book’s beautiful because it makes a gradual transition from this bucolic setting to these increasingly menacing events. The narrator begins to realise that there’s an uncomfortable parallel between what’s happening here and what was being done to the Jews in Europe. He turns to one of his fellow soldiers and says this, and the answer he gets is: ‘Do you know how badly these people would be treated anywhere else? We’re doing them a favour. We’re putting them on trucks and we’re sending them to their own people. No other army in the world would treat them as well as this.’ That kind of dialectic has been a relatively constant theme of the whole debate in Israel right up to now. There’s a camp that says we’re doing bad things and there’s a camp that says that anybody in a similar position, surrounded by enemies, threatened with extinction, would behave much worse. What makes Khirbet Khizeh particularly interesting is that it was published in Hebrew in Israel and was very widely read, and is still, I think, on the school curriculum. So the story of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is still very much part of Israel’s literary history. But in spite of all this, it did not enter the national consciousness. In other words it was very much a national myth until not very long ago that all the Arabs left Israel of their own accord, because the Jordanians and the Egyptians and the Syrians and all the rest said, ‘Come to us and we’ll all repel the Zionist aggressor together.’ The reality was that some people left because they were scared and some because they were expelled. And there were some massacres as well. So this book was very widely read, and yet somehow its story was not part of the national story. It came out again in translation very recently and was published by this small boutique publishing house in Jerusalem. It’s a publishing house that specialises in translating Levantine literature and bringing it to the attention of English speakers. It’s run by a couple and the wife in this couple, Adina Hoffman, wrote the fifth and final book on my list."