Last night, I read S. Yizhar’s Khirbet Khizeh. It’s a short novel about the Israelis’ roundup and expulsion of Arab villagers from a single village in 1948. Published in Israel in 1949, it’s a classic piece of modernist prose, veering within a single paragraph from the most biblical cadences and august references to the shit talk of soldiers. It’s also beautiful prose, observing the most incidental details—about animals, vegetation, dress, vomit—that never leave you once you read them. It also gave me a night of bad dreams. Maybe it’s because I’ve just come out of my six-month immersion in the Arendt/Eichmann archive, but it’s almost impossible—even if you’re the most fastidious of scholars or committed of Zionists—not to read Khirbet Khizeh without […]