From
A World to Win News
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During the wait, the narrator starts thinking about
how fighting the war was one thing, you fought to stay alive, never mind the
goal of the war. But emptying the villages ''pestered the soul, and the best
thing to do was to rid oneself of it, assume a furious glance and fix it upon
that very village, what was its name, the one in front of us.'' The narrator
fails to connect the dots, that the systematic emptying of Palestinian villages
he describes was a basic goal of the war from the start. ''Once villages were
something you attacked and took by storm. Today they were nothing but gaping
emptiness screaming out with a silence that was at once evil and sad. These
bare villages, the day was coming when they would begin to cry out. As you went
through them, all of a sudden, without knowing where from, you found yourself
silently followed by invisible eyes of walls, courtyards, and alleyways.
Desolate abandoned silence. Your guts clenched.''
When the order is given to attack and gunfire rattles
all around there is great glee among the Israeli soldiers. They argue over who
is the better shot and who should use the machine gun. Many villagers manage to
escape with nothing but the clothes on their back. Frantic mothers desperately
gather their children but they and others don't succeed in leaving before the
arrival of the soldiers.
Going through the village, the narrator is distressed
by how similar it is to the countless others they had taken, and by the signs
of life left by those who had just fled.
''The mattresses were still laid out, the fire among
the cooking-stones was still smouldering, one moment the chickens were pecking
in the rubbish as usual and the next they were running away screeching as
though they were about to be slaughtered. Dogs were sniffing suspiciously, half
approaching, half-barking. And the implements in the yard were still – it was
clear – in active use. And silence had not yet settled except as a kind of
wonderment and stupefaction, as though the outcome hadn't yet been determined,
and it was still possible that things would be straightened out and restored to
the way they had been before. In one yard a donkey was standing, with
mattresses and colourful blankets piled on its back, falling on their sides and
collapsing on the ground, because while they were being hastily loaded, the
throb of fear ‘They're-here-already!' had overcome the people, and they'd
shouted: 'To hell with it, just run!' And in the next-door courtyard, which
contained a kitchen garden, with a well-tended patch of potatoes, the fine
tilth of its soil and the bright green of the leaves calling to you and telling
you to go straight home and do nothing but cultivate beautiful potatoes.''
As the soldiers pushed through the village, leaving
behind the first curls of smoke, they gathered the remaining villagers who had
not managed to escape.
''When a stone house exploded with a deafening thunder
and a tall column of dust – its roof visible from where we were, floating
peacefully, all spread out, intact, and suddenly splitting and breaking up high
in the air and falling in a mass of debris, dust, and a hail of stones – a
woman whose house it apparently was, leapt up, burst into wild howling and
started to run in that direction, holding a baby in her arms, while another wretched
child who could already stand, clutched the hem of her dress, and she screamed,
pointed, talked, and choked, and now her friend got up, and another, and an old
man stood up too, and other people rose to their feet as she began to run,
while the child attached to the hem of her dress was dragged for a moment and
stumbled to the ground and bawled… She had suddenly understood, it seemed, that
it wasn't just about waiting under the sycamore tree to hear what the Jews
wanted and then to go home, but that her home and her world had come to a full
stop, and everything had turned dark and was collapsing; suddenly she had
grasped something inconceivable, terrible, incredible, standing directly before
her, real and cruel, body to body, and there was no going back.''
There is some questioning and back-and-forth banter
among the Israeli soldiers. ''What will happen to them? What will they eat or
drink?'' asked one soldier. Another replies, ‘Stop thinking so much. And if
that's the way you feel, you can go with them. ‘
''Something struck me like lightning. All at once
everything seemed to mean something different, more precisely: exile. This was
exile.''
The Palestinians are herded together and shipped off
in trucks. When the narrator tells his commanding officer that this is a filthy
war, he is told that Jewish immigrants will come and settle this land and it
will be beautiful, a Hebrew Khizeh on the ruins of the former village.
Biblical references abound throughout the book,
referring to the two thousand years of exile of the Jews. But the Jews here are
now the masters who came, shot, burned, blew up and drove others into exile. In
spite of this realization the narrator fails to overcome his moral paralysis
and complicity.
Much
greater crimes were committed during the expulsions than takes place in the
book where no Palestinian is killed. While Khirbet Khizeh is a fictitious
village, it is nonetheless emblematic of the actual expulsions that occurred
with the establishment of the state of Israel
and which are still going on today in areas near the ever increasing Israeli
settlements in the West Bank .
The
Israeli historian Pappe calls what the Zionist movement led by David Ben-Gurion
and his closest advisors started in 1948 “ethnic cleansing”. More than 500
Palestinian villages were forcefully emptied of their inhabitants through
terrorist attacks carried out by various Israeli militias like the Stern Gang,
Haganah and Irgun as well as the Israeli Defence Force. Pappe references newly
released military and political archives as well as the diaries of David
Ben-Gurion. The directives of Plan Dalet included "bombarding villages…
setting fire to homes, properties and goods, expulsion, demolition and planting
mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from
returning." Pappe also documents how water supplies were poisoned, and
that the atrocities committed included massacres and the rape of many women.
All this has been erased from conventional Israeli history.
Approximately 800,000 Palestinians were exiled, more
than half the population of Palestine
In
the book the soldiers differ amongst themselves about what they are doing. ''As
they argue they are impressed by a woman with a seven year old child. There was
something special about her. She seemed stern, self-controlled, austere in her
sorrow. Tears, which hardly seemed to be her own, rolled down her cheeks. And
the child too was sobbing a kind of stiff-lipped 'what have you done to us.'...
I felt ashamed in her presence and lowered my eyes. It was as though there were
an outcry in their gait, a kind of sullen accusation: Damn you... a
determination to endure her suffering with courage, and how now, when her world
had fallen into ruins, she did not want to break down before us. Exalted in
their pain and sorrow above our – wicked – existence they went on their way and
we could also see how something was happening in the heart of the boy,
something that, when he grew up, could only become a viper inside him, that
same thing that was now the weeping of a helpless child.''
The
narrator is caught between the indifference of the other soldiers and his own
revulsion at what he and they are doing. But in calling the boy's righteous
anger a "viper", he reveals an attitude that still sees what he
considers the interests of "his people" as higher than the interests
of other human beings. He hates the methods being used to create Israel , but does not reject the goal of a
Zionist state in Palestine
The author himself was less conflicted. He spent a
good part of his life as an officer in the Israeli military.
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