Khirbet Khizeh (11 page)

 

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.”

 

David Shulman

Jerusalem, November 2007

 

ALSO BY S. YIZHAR

Days of Ziklag

Preliminaries

At Sea

Asides

Beautiful Malcolmia

Discovering Elijah

 

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

S. Yizhar was the pen name of Yizhar Smilansky, born in Rehovot in 1916. A longtime member of the Knesset, he is most famous as the author of
Khirbet Khizeh
and of the untranslated magnum opus
Days of Ziklag
. He died in 2006.

 

A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

Nicholas de Lange, a professor emeritus of Hebrew and Jewish studies at Cambridge University, has translated many Hebrew novels, including
Preliminaries
by S. Yizhar.

Yaacob Dweck translated Haim Sabato's
The Dawning of the Day
. He is an assistant professor of history and Judaic studies at Princeton University.

 

 

A NOTE ABOUT THE AFTERWORD AUTHOR

David Shulman teaches Sanskrit and other Indian languages at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published numerous books and is the author of
Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine
. Shulman was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1987.

 

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Hebrew copyright © 1949 by Noemi Smilansky and Zmora Bitan Publishers

English translation copyright © 2008 by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck

Afterword copyright © 2008 by David Shulman and Ibis Editions

All rights reserved

English translation originally published in 2008 by Ibis Editions, Israel

English translation published in 2011 by Granta Books, Great Britain

Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published by arrangement with the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature

First Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition, 2014

 

This volume reproduces the translation edited and published by Ibis Editions in 2008.

 

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014949321

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-374-53556-8

E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71385-0

 

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Ibis Editions and the translators would like to thank Nitsa Ben-Ari, Isaac Zailer, and Gideon Nevo for their generous help. Special thanks as well to the Maor Foundation, Jerusalem and St. Louis.