S. Yizhar was the pen name of Yizhar Smilansky, an intelligence officer in Israel’s Givati Brigade during the 1948 war and a founding father of modern Hebrew literature. Khirbet Khizeh, a novella based on his experience in the war, is a parable about the destruction and erasure of a Palestinian village.
The narrator is an Israeli soldier whose unit invades the eponymous village, drives out its inhabitants, and burns it to the ground. As he watches weeping mothers, bawling children, and pleading old men being marched out of the village and loaded onto trucks, he grapples with the morality of the expulsion—and of Zionism itself. Yizhar was thirty-two years old when he wrote the book, in May 1949, before the final Israeli-Arab armistice was signed. He was then a newly elected member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, representing the ruling Mapai party of David Ben-Gurion. Though he maintained that the story was a work of fiction and refused to identify the actual village that he had called Khirbet Khizeh, he insisted on its accuracy. “Everything I wrote about…is, sadly, reality,” he asserted in a 1978 essay about the book. “Everything…is reported accurately, meticulously documented, from the operation order on a specific date right down to the last details.”
The true Khirbet Khizeh was revealed three decades after the war. In 1978 Yizhar’s commander, Yehuda Be’eri, identified the village—Khirbet al-Khisas, in present-day Ashkelon, just north of the Gaza Strip—and named himself as the man who had given the expulsion order. On November 25, 1948, he directed units to enter Khirbet al-Khisas and eight other villages between northern Gaza and the coastal town of al-Majdal. There they were to search the villages, round up the inhabitants, and expel them all to Gaza, after which the houses were to be “burned and razed.” The orders were carried out five days later. The residents of Khirbet al-Khisas have remained stateless and exiled ever since.
It is no accident that what for many years was regarded as the only Israeli work of fiction to confront the Nakba was written in May 1949, when the graves were still fresh, most of the churches and mosques still standing. In their first years of statehood, Israelis were well aware of the ethnic cleansing they had perpetrated, the swift reduction of a Palestinian majority into a minority. They had seen the columns of haggard refugees. They had looted the furniture and valuables left behind. They had helped new immigrants move into emptied Palestinian homes. They had watched bulldozers destroy ancient villages, and they had planted trees that covered up the crime. Their own army intelligence assessment of June 1948 had determined that most refugees were driven out by “Jewish military action” and not by calls from Arab leaders to flee, as later Israeli propaganda asserted. Denial had not yet taken hold.
And so it was that Khirbet Khizeh could become an acclaimed and best-selling book when it was published in September 1949. The subject of expulsion was not yet taboo, and most of the critics didn’t focus on it. One of the few who did—David Maletz, writing in the Mapai-affiliated newspaper Davar—objected not to the accuracy of the novella’s details, which he called “powerful and cruelly truthful,” but to the sanctimony of those who condemned Israeli actions: “Why single out Khirbet Khizeh?… We all had a hand in the expulsion, all grabbed what we could.” All Israelis, including Yizhar,
share in that great edifice of our independence constructed over the past two years—on the ruins of their empty homes. That’s the reality, and we can’t shut our eyes to it. No nice words can help, no self-righteousness.
Khirbet Khizeh is often cited as the pioneering work of a genre Israelis call “shooting and crying.” The term is a pejorative, though the insult intended varies from speaker to speaker. To the Israeli left wing, the problem is not crying but having shot first. To the right, it is the hypocrisy of crying afterward. The book in some ways anticipates these critiques, presenting a conflicted protagonist who is both tormented by the immoral orders he executes and disgusted with himself for denying his own complicity:
If it had to be done let others do it. If someone had to get filthy, let others soil their hands. I couldn’t. Absolutely not. But immediately another voice started up inside me singing this song: bleeding heart, bleeding heart, bleeding heart. With increasing petulance and a psalm to the beautiful soul that left the dirty work to others, sanctimoniously shutting its eyes, averting them so as to save itself from anything that might upset it, with eyes too pure to behold evil, who has looked upon unbearable iniquity. And I hated the entirety of my being.*
The narrator’s awareness of his own hypocrisy is among the great virtues of the story. After the expulsion of the inhabitants of Khirbet Khizeh, he agonizes over Zionism’s greatest contradiction—the notion that Jews have a right to return to a homeland after two thousand years, while Palestinians cannot return to actual homes after two or twenty:
My guts cried out. Colonizers, they shouted. Lies, my guts shouted. Khirbet Khizeh is not ours. The Spandau gun never gave us any rights. Oh, my guts screamed. What hadn’t they told us about refugees. Everything, everything was for the refugees, their welfare, their rescue…our refugees, naturally. Those we were driving out—that was a totally different matter.
The story of Khirbet al-Khisas is not unique. More than four hundred Khirbet Khizehs were depopulated in the 1948 war. Hundreds of new Jewish communities were built in their place. “So many of us, in this country, repress somewhere in their memories the story of their private Khirbet Khizeh,” writes Ephraim Kleiman, an economist at the Hebrew University who, in his 1978 appreciation of Yizhar’s novella, recounts his own experience expelling Palestinians from the Negev desert in 1949. With the benefit of hindsight, Kleiman writes:
It seems to me also that, truth to tell, we were not then willing to admit to ourselves that the war was a historical necessity, and not the result of the caprice of some Arab leader…. We did not ask ourselves whether, had there been no war, we would not have aspired, or even been compelled, to bring about those same consequences.
The story of expulsion that Kleiman tells will be familiar to readers of Yizhar: “‘Dirty work,’ someone said. And when no one responded, he repeated, ‘Dirty work.’” Kleiman read Khirbet Khizeh only months after the end of his army service:
It hit me right between the eyes. Despite the differences in the features of the place and in the details of the event, I knew that I had been there before. Someone else, a stranger, who had not been there, had succeeded in relating what we had seen and what we had reflected on…. He described my feelings and thoughts better than I could have done myself.
It took time for these events to fade from collective memory and later to be repressed. When in 1964 Israel’s education ministry adopted Khirbet Khizeh as an optional part of the high school curriculum, the decision hardly attracted notice. But by 1978 the TV broadcast of an adaptation of the book produced a public outcry. Most viewers, a survey found, had misgivings. Several factors were behind this shift in attitude. Politics in Israel had just undergone a revolution, from three decades of labor Zionist rule to the first-ever government headed by the right-wing Likud. The 1967 war and occupation of Gaza and the West Bank had brought the Palestinian issue to the fore.
It was no longer as easy for Israelis to ignore the Palestinians. The state now had hundreds of thousands of refugees from 1948 living under its rule, their old homes and lands suddenly within reach. There was also the question of whether Israel’s colonization of the occupied territories would lead to more expulsions, more Khirbet Khizehs. The young guard of the left-wing Mapam party created the slogan “Dig in Shiloh”—a West Bank settlement established the year of the TV broadcast—“and you’ll find Khirbet Khizeh.” To which a right-wing activist replied, “Many of the settlements of Hashomer Hatzair”—a constituent faction of Mapam—“are built right over a ‘Khirbet Khizeh.’”
Debates about 1948 are now a thing of the past. Most Israelis rarely think of the expulsions carried out in their name, neither the ones in 1948 and 1967 nor those in the present. During the last three years, dozens of Palestinian communities have been violently driven out of their West Bank lands, dozens of Khirbet Khizehs entirely uprooted. As this process accelerates, most Israelis look away. Denial, however, is a tricky thing. It is a form of simultaneously seeing and not seeing, knowing and not knowing. In the early months of the Gaza genocide, the very same Israeli pundits, journalists, and political leaders who once refused to admit that any expulsions had occurred in 1948 now promised the Palestinians a new Nakba, a “Gaza Nakba,” a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948.”
A year later, by which time Israel had forced nearly two million Gaza residents from their homes, more than twice as many individuals as it had displaced throughout Palestine in 1948, some of these same people were outraged that the former army chief of staff and defense minister Moshe Yaalon accurately described Israel’s actions as ethnic cleansing. A subsequent poll found that 82 percent of Israeli Jews supported the expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza and 56 percent favored the expulsion of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship.
For most Israelis, there is little incentive to change course. Neither their own leaders nor those around the world are pushing them to reconsider. In 2024, as outraged Europeans took to the streets in thousands of protests against the Gaza genocide, Israel enjoyed a record year of arms sales, over half of them to European governments. That same year the Biden–Harris administration gave Israel an unprecedented $17.9 billion in military aid. This while the country was using starvation as a method of warfare, repeatedly preventing the entry of humanitarian assistance to Gaza as the IPC, the UN-backed hunger monitor, declared that more than half a million people there suffered “catastrophic food insecurity,” the most severe level. Proposals in the EU to limit its funding of Israel were blocked. Even a ban on trade with Israeli settlements—an obligation of all states, according to the International Court of Justice—hasn’t been so much as proposed by the European Commission or the US Congress. Among younger Israelis, ignorance prevails. Studies over the past two decades have found that most university students could not identify the occupied territories, that a majority of Jewish eleventh and twelfth graders failed to correctly answer “What is the Green Line?” (Israel’s pre-1967 boundary), and that less than half of Jewish primary and secondary school teachers were capable of answering the same or listing the major wars Israel has fought. In the early 2000s the Israeli historian Anita Shapira screened the film adaptation of Khirbet Khizeh for her students at Tel Aviv University. They reacted with shocked silence, then asked for reassurance that what they’d seen wasn’t true: “Anita, it wasn’t like that. You’ll explain it to us, right?”
Such expressions of incredulity seem almost quaint now. Young people today would be more likely to dismiss the film out of hand or demand that their teacher be fired for showing it—no land acknowledgments here, not while there is still dirty work to be done.
What’s noteworthy is not just that the majority of young Israelis have learned little about the recent history of the ground on which they stand, nor that they haven’t read or even heard of the only canonical Hebrew literary work that portrays the reality of the state’s establishment. It’s that they live in a society that can’t bear to look in the mirror. Yizhar’s text, long considered a modern Hebrew masterpiece, is no longer part of the curriculum. In fact, in bookstores across the country the Hebrew edition of Khirbet Khizeh can scarcely be found. Like the ruins of Khirbet al-Khisas, it has become a relic, a vestige of an unwanted truth.
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