Khirbet Khizeh

by S. Yizhar

  Twaneh, spilling over a thorny hilltop, is a village of radiant charm, intensified perhaps by the sense of precariousness that shadows every moment there. Last Saturday was a day of pristine, early-winter sunlight, rather like the one in Khirbet Khizeh. Every crack and fissure, every shrub and pebble, each house of rough-hewn stone stood out, starkly contoured, on the brown sweep of the hill. Most of us have powerful memories from this place; I will never forget the rainy day the settlers shot at us and beat us when we came to guard the villagers as they plowed their field. This time we sat, sipping tea, in the sun at the entrance to Hafez’s house as we rehearsed the possible scenarios for next week’s action—a solidarity march to Tuba, just over the hill. The night before, settlers from the “outpost” of Havat Maon attacked the villagers yet again; three villagers were arrested by the police on trumped-up charges along with one of the international volunteers stationed in Twaneh. We heard the story from dignified, unfailingly cheerful Ali, our friend from Tuba; his children walk the footpath each day to their school in Twaneh, braving the threat from Havat Maon; his daughter was badly wounded in the eye in an attack some two years ago. It is that same path that we’ll walk next weekend with the volunteers. While waiting to leave, as the sun slid toward the horizon, I stole a few moments to finish reading the story that has gripped me for days, that seemed as close to me as the walls and hedges and stones of the village. I think I understand it now.

  I had forgotten the tough, supple feel of Yizhar’s Hebrew (splendidly translated here by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck). No other Hebrew prose is remotely like it. Today it’s a vanished language, this experimental mélange of wild, lucid lyricism, often dark and menacing, pointed biblical allusions that go off like hand grenades in the midst of the meandering, stream-of-consciousness syntax, and the bizarre, somewhat stiff colloquial speech of his tormented protagonists. Modern Hebrew was much younger then, sixty years ago, but haunted, of course, like everything written in this language, by the grisly and compelling ghosts of the distant past. Look at a simple sentence like the following: zik ha-tzayyadim ha-omem be-khol adam nitlake’ah banu atah bi-gvurah, “The thrill of the hunt that lurks inside every man had taken firm hold of us.” This comes at an early moment in the story, when the narrator and his comrades, still far outside the village, are just beginning to strafe it with their machine gun. “Thrill” translates the Hebrew zik, which means “a spark” (also perhaps a firebrand and a comet or shooting star), and the word immediately calls up for the Hebrew reader passages like Proverbs 26:18–19, which speaks of the man who, pretending to be mad, shoots “sparks, arrows, and death” (ha-yoreh zikim hizim va-mavet) in order to delude his neighbor. Feigned, lethal madness masking deceitful malice—it’s easy to see how the verses feed into Yizhar’s dense web of allusion. And we have Isaiah 50:11, threatening the enemies of the Lord who will, says the prophet, eventually walk into the “burning fire and the firebrands” they have ignited (uve-zikot bi’artem). And so on. It’s not enough that these soldiers are happily shooting at innocents, or that the thrill they feel is recognized at once as something universal, hidden inside every man; the very words conjure up the sinister and the sinful. And the sentence ends on a still more bitter and ironic note, for “taken firm hold of us” is bi-gvurah—the standard Hebrew term for “in strength” or “with heroism.” The sordid thrill has heroically taken hold. Our young heroes are already enmeshed in incipient crime. (And I have still not said anything about the astonishing, possibly unique, tragic adjective omem, translated here as “lurks inside,” and conveying darkness, obtuseness, or a failing of light.)

  Yizhar’s text is saturated with such tones. No sentence is innocent, no matter how preoccupied it may seem to be with the physical beauty of the fields, the sky, the season, or some other apparently extraneous perception. (Yizhar is perhaps the greatest poet of Palestinian landscape in modern Hebrew.) The narrator takes in the sensual world around him, it fills his eyes and penetrates all his pores, at moments it seems to offer a desperately sought distraction, yet the intense beauty of this world ultimately intensifies an experience of emergent human evil. The contrast itself can hardly be contained. The infuriating incongruity of extreme natural beauty and overwhelming pain inflicted by others, with or without obvious intention, is something all Israeli peace workers know well.

  A little farther into the story, as the first houses are being blown up and their owners cower in shock and fear:

  We had a sudden sense of foreboding as though we were about to be attacked, the alien walls were closing in on us, encompassing us with solemn malicious whispering, suddenly we seemed cut off, devoid of hope, no one knew whence the blow might suddenly fall—unless there were no other—and we ourselves were it, in our image and likeness.

  Again the culmination devastates the reader: the slightly scrambled syntax, so characteristic of Yizhar, produces sudden insight (the horror is not external to the narrator and his companions) and then the inevitable biblical and/or liturgical resonance. “In our image and likeness” is bi-dmutenu ke-tzalmenu: a tormenting echo of Genesis 1:26–27, or, if you prefer, of Genesis 5:3 or Psalms 39:7 or the most exquisite of the seven blessings spoken under the Jewish wedding canopy, the one that affirms that human love is the direct result of our being created be-tzelem dmut tavnito, “in the very image of God’s own form.”

  The most famous of all such linguistic infiltrations comes in the final word of the story: ha-ke-tza’akatah. This is Genesis 18:20–21: “Verily, the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and verily their sin is exceeding grievous. I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it [ha-ke-tza’akatah], which is come unto Me.” Here is Yizhar’s reworking: “And when silence had closed in on everything and no man disturbed the stillness, which yearned noiselessly for what was beyond silence—then God would come forth and descend to roam the valley, and see whether all was according to the cry that had reached him.” The Hebrew sentence ends with the dangling phrase—“according to the cry”—and this is all the reader needs to conjure up the image of a moral and social depravity so unredeemed that it can only call down destruction. The heavy silence the narrator imagines in fact shudders with a wordless scream. All of this is in that one last unmistakable word that leaves the story open-ended, wounded, incapable of ever coming to rest.

  It is easier, it seems, to talk about the language than about the themes of this story; I’ve been putting off this moment. The trouble is that, in parts, it’s so painfully familiar. Khirbet Khizeh could easily be any of the dozen or so Palestinian villages that I’ve come to know over the last few years, working the peace front on the grass-roots level inside the occupied territories. Same stone houses, same twisting lanes, same random assortment of donkeys and camels and horses and chickens, same vineyards and olive groves and fields, same succulent language, same clothes, same faces—often sad and scared. And there are the obvious differences, too. The story was published in May 1949. Things happen in war. Sometimes we say this to ourselves, as a kind of mantra, meant to comfort. War is war, right? The expulsion of large Palestinian populations, along with the flight of many others, was part of the wider context; the new state had been attacked by Arab armies, it was a life-and-death struggle; these are things we know, things taught in the schools. Maybe they help some Israelis tell a story that makes sense to them. “Nobody asked them to start these wars and things,” says Yehuda toward the end of the novella. “Let them eat what they’ve cooked!” I’ve heard those words, and others like them, hollow and self-serving, too many times. Anything to even the score, as if it could ever be evened, as if some perverse calculus of right and wrong could produce an equation that helped our side come out ahead in the final reckoning.

  Today things take a different form—though for a Palestinian experiencing daily life in the occupied territories, or for someone like me who has become a certain kind of witness to that life, Yizhar’s trenchant text has uncanny relevance. If you h
appen to live in Twaneh or Susya or Tuba or any of a hundred other villages, the threat of expulsion is very real. It is generally much slower in pace than the sudden cruelties of 1948. There is also some hope that we can stop it, using whatever means we have at our disposal—the media, the courts (although their record is abysmal when it comes to the territories), our physical presence on the ground, our words, yes, even words may be of use. Meanwhile, the everyday reality is grim. Palestinian Susya—thirteen families still clinging to the last small piece of their historic lands on a hilltop across from the Israeli settlement of Susya—has demolition orders hanging over all of its meager huts and tents. The Susya villagers have already been deported four or five times—forced by soldiers and, it seems, their settler-allies into trucks in the middle of the night and dumped on the road many miles away (shades of Yizhar). Each time they have come back to what is left of their homes. The vast machinery of the Israeli system of occupation—the military courts, the bureaucracy, the committee (dominated by settlers) that issues, or rather declines to issue, building permits, the politicians, the soldiers stationed in south Hebron—all this is brought to bear on this one tiny spot, as if the mere presence of these Palestinian survivors is intolerable to those who have taken their land. At Twaneh, settlers spread poison in the Palestinian fields, hoping to wipe out the herds of sheep and goats on which the villagers subsist—hoping to force them to leave. At Tuba, which has the singular misfortune of having Havat Maon for its neighbor, sheer physical survival is a daily challenge. Tuba is cut off from any road, utterly isolated, its people subject to constant depredations; the whole area of the village and its lands, like much of the south Hebron hills, is included in a sweeping order of expropriation meant, ostensibly, to turn this region into what is known in Hebrew as a “firing zone,” that is, a training area for the army. The possibility of exile looms before them. The Supreme Court has not yet pronounced on this case.

  In short, and sad to say, what began in 1948 under different circumstances continues today, and there is at the moment no war to provide even the semblance of a rationalization. All Israelis know this, though most pay no attention. What happens to the people on the “other side,” as it is called, is of little consequence. And yet, in some ways our situation is perhaps after all a little better than that described in Yizhar’s story.

  Notice, for example, the fact that the narrator, for all his revulsion at what is happening, never even considers refusing to carry out the order. Of course, most soldiers would never resist, though a faint hint of the idea does pass through the narrator’s mind:

  But not this … not this … something was still unclear. Just a kind of bad feeling. Like being forced into a nightmare and not being allowed to wake up from it. You’re caught up with several voices. You don’t know what. Maybe the answer is to stand up and resist? But maybe, the opposite, to see and be and feel …

  To refuse is not a serious option here. One can’t help identifying with this speaker, who allows himself to feel, who won’t surrender to the anesthesia that normally comes into play in such situations; who won’t look away. And he is not entirely alone. The soldiers at Khirbet Khizeh are certainly not demonic figures. They are ordinary people, frightened and exhausted, caught up in an overdetermined, violent conflict and in evil that takes on many forms. It isn’t all their fault, though they are party to a crime. They have doubts; some of them can almost imagine their victims’ pain. Here is Shlomo, drawing the inevitable conclusion: “When you go to a place where you might die that’s one thing, but when you go to a place where other people are liable to die and you just stand and watch them, that’s something quite different. At least that’s what I think.” To which Yehuda characteristically replies: “Stop thinking so much.”

  It’s a common enough solution. But in Israel today, literally thousands of young Israelis have refused to serve in the army of occupation. Many quietly make arrangements with their units and their officers; many hundreds have gone to jail for their act of conscience. A few have demanded, on principle, to be tried at a full-scale court-martial—a huge risk, since it carries with it the possibility of three years’ imprisonment. They want to look the army in the eye and force it to acknowledge its complicity in the evils of the occupation. Despite everything, there is ample space for such acts of principle. In my very first week in the Israeli army, in 1977, one day before we were to swear our oath of allegiance and obedience unto death, an officer from the General Staff in Tel Aviv was sent to talk to us, to explain the meaning of the oath. Someone asked him what we should do if faced with an order that we regarded as immoral. To his immense credit, he answered: “There is no rule for such a situation. It is between you and your conscience.” I’m not sure today’s recruits would hear such an answer. I’m not sure they wouldn’t. But for a soldier who refuses today, the deep loneliness that Yizhar’s hero describes is perhaps a little less severe.

  Sometimes even the helpless villagers are not quite so alone. In 2002, settlers from Itamar and Tapuach—two of the most predatory Israeli settlements in Samaria—drove the inhabitants of Kafr Yanun from their village. The Palestinians were ready to give up, unable to stand the daily routine of terror and humiliation, ready to go into exile. Israeli activists from Ta’ayush—“Arab–Jewish Partnership,” one of the most effective of the peace groups—brought them back to the village and stayed with them for weeks to protect them from the settlers and the soldiers. Kafr Yanun is still there. The lives of its people are far from easy, but they are still there.

  In the genealogy of Israeli self-awareness, Yizhar’s novella has a niche of its own. Never has the tale been so clearly told. Though there have been attempts to discredit the author, even to brand him (or the film made of his story that was, after considerable controversy, broadcast on Israeli television in early 1978) as treasonous, the story has found its own hidden channels into minds and hearts—not, perhaps, those of the so-called mainstream but rather those situated on the rather more interesting margins of Israeli culture. A direct line links Khirbet Khizeh with today’s peace movements, peopled by ordinary human beings who will not, under any circumstances, lend their hands to blatant injustice. None of us could formulate the matter with Yizhar’s unflinching forcefulness, but there is not one of us who would fail to recognize the feelings he describes—the outrage, the terrible confusion, the grief, the sense of collective self-betrayal, the isolation from one’s friends and fellows, the paralysis and hesitation, the bodily urge to protest. “My guts cried out. Colonizers, they shouted. Lies, my guts shouted. Khirbet Khizeh is not ours.” All of us have witnessed many times what Yizhar calls “that unique heroism of the weak who didn’t know what to do and were unable to do anything, the silenced weak.” All of us have experienced the narrator’s despair and imitated his final act of sorrow: “There was nowhere to wander or to distance myself. I went down and mingled with them like someone looking for something.” He is describing something each of us knows intimately. We are still looking.

  It comes down, I suppose, to the instrumental use of human beings and to the creation of a system, driven by greed, that puts such naked instrumentalism before any other value. You’ll forgive, I hope, this abstract statement; Yizhar said it better. Malice, like simple decency, has its own irreducible integrity. But perhaps it is worth stressing, by way of conclusion, that this story is in fact far from being moralistic, utterly remote from preaching and pontification. The protest it describes, like the protests enacted by today’s activists, comes from another place, somewhere deep inside the body, a site of inadvertent revulsion and unresolved struggle. No one should ever idealize it, no more than Yizhar does in his subtle portrait of the soldier-narrator’s quandary. He knew of what he wrote, knew the cost and the fear and the inevitable failure and the murkiness of the moments in which a person might make a choice—even with respect to the rather basic question of what one allows oneself to see. Morality, in the usual sense of the word, is perhaps the least of it. Rather, the
choice has something to do with extricating oneself from the thick envelope of one’s tribe and neighbors and colleagues, and the words that fill all the open spaces, so as to touch, at least in passing, that elusive, unsentimental freedom that defines the human being. It is from this point that one can act. I believe this is the true import of Yizhar’s great text.

  So next Shabbat I’ll be back in Twaneh together with some two hundred activists, Israeli and Palestinian. We’re in it together. (That’s another interesting change from 1948.) If the army doesn’t stop us, and probably even if it does, we’ll march up the stony path to Tuba to ensure that the villagers can plow their fields, this year, in the face of the settlers who will be doing whatever they can to prevent this. These settlers are not about to go away, not yet, and in Tuba one lives a day at a time. Each plowed field is a small victory. Every day that the children of the village arrive safely at their school in Twaneh without being beaten by the settlers en route is a celebration. Maybe we’ll briefly change the balance of power, maybe the story of Tuba will find its way into the press, maybe someone will care. We’ll be carrying signs, in Hebrew and Arabic, for the benefit of the villagers and the soldiers and the press, signs that say something like “Lift the Siege on Tuba!” and “Evacuate the Settler Outposts” and “No to Occupation, Yes to Peace.” Maybe I’ll make one for myself: “No More Khirbet Khizehs.”