The following is a paper I wrote for a seminar on Middle Eastern Literature in translation I took with Prof. Nasrin Rahimieh a few years ago. I have updated it a little and cleaned it up a bit, but it's mostly the same. I decided to put this up because it's an odd little book with an odd little life, one that seems to perplex American readers, who seem to get only a banal 'war is bad' humanism out of it. There isn't too much written on this novel, in English at least, so this is a tiny addition to a tiny pile.
The 2008 Ibis edition of Khirbet Khizeh (or Hirbet Hizeh or Hirbet Hizah) by S. Yizhar (pen name of Yizhar Smilansky, writer and politican) ends with
unintentional irony. In the afterword, David Shulman deftly interlaces
discussions of S. Yizhar's language with his own personal reminiscences, after
which he ultimately ends the book by relating the 1949 novel to contemporary
peace activism in the Israeli/Palestinian area: “We'll be carrying signs in
Hebrew and Arabic, for the benefit of the villagers and the soldiers and the
press . . . Maybe I'll make one for myself: 'No More Khirbet Khizehs'” (131).
The intended message here is that there should be no more events similar to
that which occurred at the fictional town of Khirbet Khizeh. The irony is, of course, that Khirbet
Khizeh is itself already a sign, one which does not denote an actual
geographic site nor an actual historical event; it cannot be said to have
occurred except within the fictional space of Yizhar's narrative. As an event,
it never was, except as literature, and therefore there cannot ever be another
one—there cannot be “More”—except, perhaps, as more literature. This
equivocation of the referent of Shulman's hypothetical sign threatens his message
if taken on a literal level. “No More Khirbet Khizehs” is intended to mean that
there should no longer be any events similar to that represented in the novel
but if we take seriously the fictional state of “Khirbet Kizeh,” then this sign
could read, against Shulman's intentions, that there should no longer be any
events that would produce another fictional invasion of a fictional village, or
literary events similar to the writing of the novel. While the image of Don
Quijote bracing himself against a windmill is grossly overused, I can think of
no more apt literary reference here for Shulman’s confusion of fiction and
reality.
Of course, this is not an uncommon way to frame this story;
even Jacqueline Rose’s much more tempered review in The Guardian asserts that “Khirbet
Khizeh is a story which, with the least ambivalence, offers to official
Zionist history its strongest, unanswerable, counterpoint.” This
is precisely the position I want to argue against. And if I foreground the
Shulman's afterward as ironic, it is not because absolute literalism is or
should be a mainstay of activist protest signs. Rather, I wish to emphasize the
complexity of the interaction between literature and political critique, an
interaction whose opacity stems, paradoxically, from its apparent
transparency. Khirbet Khizeh is a
novel that is deceptively straightforward but is one that attempts, I will
argue, to mitigate conflicting discursive and political demands that shaped
Israel in its early years. That is, Khirbet Khizeh is ultimately not a
critique of Israeli action, nor is it a hortatory counter-hegemonic historical
narrative, as Shulman describes it in saying “Never has the tale been so
clearly told” (128). This is not a novel that attempts to give voice to the
vanquished, something that would “cut[] right through the prevalent national
myths” (ibid. 115). In other words, I want above all else to avoid reading this
text as somehow speaking truth to power. My position would be to take seriously
the fact that Yizhar himself was an ardent supporter of the Zionist project.
When questioned in 1978 in an interview about the allegation that he had
questioned Zionism and the Jewish right to the land of Israel, Yizhar
responded: “Anybody who charges that should be pitied or given a dose of
psychotherapy” (qtd. Shapira 11). It would be a mistake, I believe, to take
this text as being somehow a critique of the state of Israel. Indeed, this
novel has been included on Israeli school curricula since 1964 and it is
precisely this contradiction—the inclusion of a text that ostensibly
demythologizes the national narrative within a national canon—that I aim to
explain. Rather than a critique of Zionism, then, I want to argue that Khirbet
Khizeh is a text that is fundamental to the founding of the sovereign state
of Israel. In order to do so, I will draw on Jacques Lacan's theory of
censorship—to give a little dose of psychotherapy!—and look to how the text's
ostensibly critical dimensions in fact serve to further the representation of
Israel as a sovereign power in the nascent state's national imaginary.
Lacan's central insight into the functioning of law on a
psychoanalytic level rests on a counterintuitive understanding of the law as
being fundamentally incomprehensible. Rather than to see the law as resting on
some incontestable and unassailable foundation, the law rests on the absence of
any understanding of its authority. That is, the law functions precisely
because its legitimacy is lacking, and so Lacan counters the notion that it is
the existence of God that ensures that His law is followed: “we analysts know full well that if God
doesn't exist, then nothing at all is permitted any longer” (128). Rather than
assuming that we follow the law because we know what it is, Lacan argues that
we follow precisely because we don't know what it is. This
counterintuitive conclusion follows from the fact that the law is derived from
discourse, which is to say that law is discourse, but the law of discourse
is impossible to comprehend: “Man is always in the position of never completely
understanding the law, because no man can master the law of discourse in its
entirety” (128). Lacan uses the example of the law that decrees, “any man who
says that the Kind of England is an idiot will have his head cut off” (128).
This example is significant since, “Censorship is always related to whatever,
in discourse, is linked to the law in so far as it is not understood” (127).
From the law that censors this specific statement, it follows that anything in
reality that would imply that the King is an idiot is also censored. The
fallacy here, the one that Shulman makes, would be to assume then that to speak
the censored words would somehow suffice to challenge the law itself:
It follows then that everything in the discourse which is of a piece with this reality, that the King of England is an idiot, is put in suspense. The subject is caught up in the necessity of having to eliminate, to extract from the discourse everything pertaining to what the law forbids one to say. Now, this interdiction as such is not at all understood. At the level of reality, no one can understand why one would have one's head cut off for saying this truth, no one grasps where the very fact of the interdiction is located. From then on, one can no longer suppose that someone who says what musn't be said and has the idea that everything is permitted will be able purely and simply to annul the law as such.
I hope I'm giving you a feeling of this final, unexplained, inexplicable mainspring upon which the existence of the law hangs. The tough thing we encounter in the analytic experience is that there is one, there is a law. And that indeed is what can never be completely brought to completion in the discourse of the law—it is its final term which explains that there is one. (129)
Because of the fact that the King is an idiot,
various parts of discourse that would imply such must be censored, including
any thoughts about the King being an idiot. But because the King is an idiot,
no-one can understand where the law is located, or where its authority derives
from. It is impossible, in other words, to explain why there is such a law
within the very “discourse of the law,” since it is this sovereign law in the
first place that structures this discourse. Thus speaking the censored term
does not annul the law, whose origin is located elsewhere. This is, I will argue,
the fundamental logic of Khirbet Khizeh.
Yizhar's text is principally about the founding the Israeli
nation, not only in that it describes the physical eviction of Arab villagers
from the space that is to become Israel, but also in that it was written in
modern Hebrew at a time when Hebrew was being established as a national
language. This text that describes the founding of the nation also partakes
in the formation of a literary canon for the nascent state. It is, in other
words, a declaration of the existence of Israel as such, and therefore should
be read as a text about the sovereignty of Israeli law. This sovereignty
dictates, then, that the text be written in a monologic voice, a fact
underscored by the fact that the Arab villagers are given no voice. Much of the
dialogue between soldiers and villagers occurs in Arabic in a Hebrew text, and
the voice of the Arab other throughout the novel could in essence be summarized
as: “But we couldn't understand much of what he was saying, and the harsh
guttural consonants of his pronunciation seemed strange and almost exaggerated
to us, like sounds in and of themselves” (97).
It would be a mistake, then, to consider the central
conflict of the narrative of Khizeh Khirbet to be one between characters
in the fictional world. This is not a story about a conflict between
any of the soldiers, or even between Israeli soldiers and Arab villagers. There
is really no possibility of the narrator disobeying orders and siding with the
other; he barely manages to vocalize his objections to his comrades. Instead,
we should understand the central conflict in this book to be, fundamentally,
one of semantics. As one of the other soldiers notes early in the text, “This
here, this isn't a war, it's a children's game” (22). The events depicted in
the novel do not appear—they do not look like—a war. Thus the narrator
questions later:
But I was overburdened with words. And once I had started I didn't know how to stop. And since I had no one to argue with—I argued with myself. And this is what I said to myself: But this is a war! Well is it a war or isn't it? And if it's a war, well, all's fair in war. Second voice: War? Against who, these people? First voice (continuing as though he's heard nothing): Perfect saints they're not (but who is?). And even if our intentions are good and honest—you can't go into the water and not get wet (wonder of wonders!). To understand and to agree that we've got to act—that's one thing, but to set out and harden your heart and do all sorts of things—that's always something else . . . (84)
The entire story could be said to revolve around the
narrator's internal questioning, “Well is it a war or isn't it?” Furthermore,
this is not a dialogic or dialectical questioning, as we can see from this
passage that this question is not even formulated as a conflict between the
narrator's two voices, but is represented as a question coming from the first
voice. This questioning is not initially presented as a political disagreement
on the level of a dialogue, even an internal dialogue, but is the initial
question within the narrative voice that gives rise to this internal conflict.
This implies that we should not read this internal dialogue as a splitting of
the narrator's consciousness, but rather as a split within the narrator's
consciousness. If the arguments between voices could be said to compose the
majority of the serious “dialogue” in this text, we should take our cue from
this passage and understand the voices to represent a monologue masquerading as
a dialogue. But because the constancy of this monologue ultimately requires a
semantic determination, these events cannot but be war, since what occurs
should be called war by the official military discourse: “This filthy Khirbet
Khizeh. This war,” declares the narrator later (88).
As this text is preeminently preoccupied with questions of
semantics, the emotional catharsis of the narrative centers on a moment of
nomination. The story follows the routine eviction of an Arab village, with the
narrative voice coming under more and more psychic distress and emotional
turbulence about “war” until suddenly the absent word around which the text
circulates abruptly enters the narrative: “Something struck me like lightning.
All at once everything seemed to mean something different, more precisely:
exile. This was exile. This was what exile was like. This is what exile looked
like” (104). The emotional strength of this epiphany must be understood within
the context of Zionist rhetoric at the time. Israel's right to exist was
founded on the negation of exile, and so the term and concept was highly
emotionally charged. As Yael Zerubavel writes, “Zionism essentially emerged as
a reaction against Exile and reflects an acute awareness of the need to find a
solution to the problems of the Jewish people and exilic Judaism” (18). The
right to the land is inextricable from the movement to negate the condition of
exile, and thus any justification of military force is inversely related to the
negativity of exile: “The darker the imagery associated with Exile, the greater
was the promise that Zionism offered and the rationalization for the price it
demanded” (ibid 22). The text itself does not shy away from this contradiction:
“Everything, everything was for the refugees, their welfare, their rescue . . .
our refugees, naturally. Those we were driving out—that was a totally different
matter. Wait. Two thousand years of exile. The whole story. Jews being killed.
Europe. We were the masters now” (109). This moment could be read—as it is by
Shulman—as a devastating critique of the Zionist program: in attempting to
rectify exile, this nascent state only reproduces it in others. By this logic, Israel
would have no right in evicting the Arab inhabitants, since these people would
then in turn be owed the land.
However, we should remember Yizhar’s commitment to the Zionist
project in reading this text. To read this naming of the military’s actions as “exile”
as constituting a serious threat to the legitimacy of the Zionism, as Shulman
does, is to assume that the law functions as a transparent, straightforward
enunciation of authority. This reading does not take into account the fundamentally
incomprehensible nature of the law,
an incomprehensibility that the text itself does not shy away from. In
describing the soldiers' marching orders, “number such and such, on such and
such day of the month,” the narrator notes explicitly the ambiguity inherent in
the initial military command: “it said, in a short line and a half, that
although the mission must be executed decisively and precisely, whatever
happened, 'no violent outbursts or disorderly conduct'—it said—'would be
permitted,' which only indicated straightaway that there was something amiss,
that anything was possible (and even planned and foreseen)” (8). In
highlighting the linguistic dimension of the order—underscored by the
interruptive repetition of the phrase “it said”—Yizhar makes explicit a
fracture in the order: it ostensibly prohibits what is implicitly “planned and
foreseen.” Yizhar's narrator then continues to unfold the implications of this
paradoxical document, concluding that they were to “burn blow up imprison load
and convey with such courtesy and with a restraint born of true culture, and
this would be a sign of a wind of change, of decent upbringings, and, perhaps,
even of the Jewish soul, the great Jewish soul” (9). A courteous imprisonment
and a cultured demolition: the language of the “operational order” strains both
syntax and comprehension. Inhering within the very language of the order, in
other words, there is “something amiss,” and the birth of the “Jewish soul”
resides precisely in this paradoxical command.
Thirty years later, in writing about the novel in the
aftermath of the controversy over its television adaptation, Yizhar writes of
the text that “everything I wrote about . . . is, sad to say, reality, black on
white and true to life. Everything there is reported with great accuracy,
meticulously documented, beginning with the operation order on a certain date
right down to all the details” (qtd. Shapira 10). The importance of the place
of this order within the text should not be overlooked, especially since the
reality of events depicted begins with it. This “something amiss” in the
soldiers' orders that designates a certain inconsistency in Israeli military
discourse parallels a similar history produced by the state of Israel that
would anesthetize the events of 1948. The official state version of these
events was first articulated in November 1948 by the Weitz committee who
concluded that “the migration of the Arabs of the Land of Israel was not caused
by persecution, violence, expulsion . . . [it was] a tactic of war on the part
of the Arabs” (qtd. Beinin 97). This formulation of the Israeli-Arab conflict
essentially depicts a one-sided war in which even retreat is figured as an
aggressive and martial tactic on the part of the Arab population. Similar to
the orders depicted in the novel, the very language of the official narrative
raises doubts as to its veracity. The polite demolition of the operational
orders in Khirbet Khizeh bears an unmistakable resemblance to the
incomprehensibly civil war depicted by the Weitz committee.
According to the historian Joel Beinin, “The authors of this report almost
certainly knew that their tale was false, because Weitz himself had actively
expelled Palestinian peasants, razed their villages, and encouraged Jewish
settlements to seize the lands of their Arab neighbors throughout the summer
and fall of 1948” (97). For those who had experienced or witnessed these
events, this discursive erasure would be obvious.
The Weitz report and the “operational orders” should be
understood to be instances of what Lacan terms “interrupted discourse” in that
“one of the most striking forms of interrupted discourse is the law in so far
as it is not understood” (127). Indeed, it is a manifestation of the law as
censorship; censorship itself is described as “part of the interrupted
character of the discourse” (127). Of course, we do not need Lacan to
understand these texts as censorship. Both the Weitz report and the
“operational orders” belie certain incomprehensibility in the articulation of
official Israeli discourse, and it is obvious that these inconsistencies derive
from the fact that they are part of the censored discourse of the Arab
expulsion of 1948. What Lacan's analysis allows us to do is to understand the
position of Khirbet Khizeh in this censored discourse. As early as 1949,
a narrative about the censored secret became part of the Israeli literary
canon; almost immediately, the “secret” was out. However, the declaration of
the censored secret is not enough to annul the law that institutes this censorship.
Indeed, one should understand the production and reception of this text as
being a canonization of this law.
The foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 was based on a
logic of justice and redress for the atrocities of the Second World War. Therefore,
the foundation of Israel is based on the recognition of another law, another
discourse: the discourse of human rights, the international community, justice
and redress. At the most absolute level, Israel could not be considered sovereign since it would itself be subject
to the laws of the international community. To read this novel as a critique of
Israel policy would be to rely again on this discourse, to appeal to the
international rule of law. Yet, within the text there is no mention of
international law, the United Nations or the discourse of human rights. It is
not by oversight that the Arab villagers are rendered in the text as abject
others, rather than as noble human beings. Their human or animal state does not
matter since the ultimate arbitrator of the text—the ultimate Other who could
determine whether or not the Arab expulsion was justified—is not the law of
human rights, but the judgment of God: “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
novel ends (112-113). The final judgment of the events of the day comes from no
human law, or any possible discourse of redress and human rights, but on a God
who can hear but is beyond language. Following this, then, Khirbet Khizeh could
certainly be read as a confession, “instead of staying silent” (7), but a
confession directed to God, not to any other foreign body that would impinge on
Israel's sovereignty or legislate its policies. In other words, aside from the
ultimate judgment of God, the state of Israel is represented as being
absolutely sovereign in the international geopolitical landscape. Not only does
Israel not have to answer to international law, it does not have to answer to
any human law whatsoever—even the law that established its right to exist. In other
words, Yizhar's project is both more radical, and more radically Zionist, than
Shulman's approximation: it declares without equivocation that Israel has no
rational, legal right to exist. Extending this logic would be to say that
if one were to argue that Israel has a legal right to exist, then its status as
a state would fall under the legislation of another law, and therefore Israel would
not be sovereign, but subject to another law. Sovereignty—true sovereignty—does
not need to find its foundation or justification in another’s law.
“We were the masters now,” says the narrator. While some may
read this as an indictment of the policies that authorized the expulsion of
Arab citizens from the lands of Israel, it should be read instead as a
straightforward declaration of sovereignty. A painful acknowledgment, perhaps,
but not ironic; it is simply a statement of fact that does not have to answer
to any justifications. What is made present in this text is a sovereign law
that proves itself through a transgression of the very discourse that founds
it, which can only manifest itself as conflict and contradiction. The more
foundational the law being transgressed, the greater the show of sovereignty,
which is the reason why this text about the founding of Israel openly
acknowledges the exile caused for others. If I may, one last time, refer to
Lacan's example of the unspeakably idiotic King of England in order to offer an
analogy. Imagine an instance in which the King slaps his own forehead and declares,
‘By God, I am an idiot!’: an announcement of an absolute sovereignty, not even
subject to his own laws. The King's subjects would then be forced to hear
the words of the sovereign—for no one can ignore the law—without allowing
themselves to understand it. The king’s subjects would then mill about, telling
one another, ‘The King himself said he's an idiot—but he cannot mean that he is
truly an idiot for that is impossible—he must mean something else—he must be a
non-idiotic idiot!’ It is only the King who can transgress the law without repercussion,
but any announcement of this transgression can only be heard by its subjects as
incomprehensible, as a declaration through the censorship it demands of others.
On the subjective level, this language of sovereignty manifests itself as a
discourse that interrupts itself, much like how the operational orders, the conclusions
of the Weitz committee, and the narrator's monologue continually
interrupt themselves. In representing the orders of the state and the actions
of the state as incomprehensible, Yizhar's prose captures this moment of a
sovereign power transgressing its own law. Khirbet Khizeh documents,
represents and ultimately affirms the tortured experience of declaring Israel's
absolute sovereignty.
Works Cited:
Beinin, Joel. “Political
Economy and Public Culture in a State of Constant Conflict: 50 Years of Jewish
Statehood.” Jewish Social Studies. 4.3 (1998): 96-141
Lacan, Jacques. Seminar
II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. (1988)
Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli.Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W W Norton,
1991.
Shapira, Anita. “Hirbet
Hizah: Between Remembrance and Forgetting.” Jewish Social Studies. 7.1
(2000): 1-62.
Shulman, David.
“Afterword.” Khirbet Khizeh. By S. Yizhar. Trans. Nicholas de Lange and
Yaacob Dweck. Jerusalem: Ibis Editions, 2008.
Yizhar, S. Khirbet
Khizeh. (1949). Trans. Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck. Jerusalem: Ibis
Editions, 2008.
Zerubavel, Yael. Recovered
Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1995.
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