Ethical and National Redemption

INTRODUCTION

At the foundation of Zionism's vision, among both its thinkers and those who acted to fulfill the vision, lay the combination of ethics and nationalism; of redemption of the individual and redemption of the nation; of the belief that Judaism's purpose is to serve as a basis for universal ethics, and the belief that national rebirth would enable the realization of these universal goals. Israel's declaration of independence was intended to fulfill this combination of the national vision and the human one; and Israel's victory in the War of Independence was in turn supposed to enable the vision's realization.

The War was the first significant event in Israel's first 70 years as a state. However, the concomitant expulsion of a large portion of Israel's Arab population compelled those who viewed themselves as victims of a millennia-old injustice to recognize the injustice that they themselves committed. This inconsistency created a fracture in the vision of an enlightened nation that exemplifies universal justice.

Texts of various types produced in the past 70 years have addressed either directly or indirectly this conflict in Zionism, which redefines Israeli culture back and forth between two identities: the victim and the aggressor—between the certainty that settling the Land of Israel was a just and necessary act, and the knowledge of the sin and guilt inherent therein—without resolving the two. On another level, it is a conflict between the choice to unite inside national borders, or to constantly move back and forth between borders and culture, thus recreating the original Zionist combination of the universal and national. S. Yizhar's Khirbet Khizeh, Menachem Begin's speeches, and A. B. Yehoshua's Mr. Mani, grapple, each in its own way, with these contradictions and choices.

KHIRBET KHIZEH

The gap between the Zionist vision and its realization was exposed powerfully by S. Yizhar in his 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh. Thus, its publication, as well as the reverberations and the debates that arose in its wake, can be described as one of the first significant events after the state's founding.

The novella opens near the end of the war, when a group of soldiers is sent to carry out an operation calling for them to evict women, children, and elderly Arabs from the village of Khirbet Khizeh. The protagonist, who opposes this act, is one of many soldiers who fought in the War. He participated in blood-soaked battles and believes with all his heart that the only place for the Jews is the Land of Israel, even if it means paying the price in blood. At the same time, he sees the injustice committed against the people of Khirbet Khizeh, protests it, and describes it from two angles: that of the expelled population, whose painful voices and fury he expresses using free indirect speech; and from his own point of view, as one who was raised on both the humanism of the prophets of Israel, and the historical memory of expulsion and exile. "Tears, which hardly seemed to be her own, rolled down her cheeks" (Yizhar, 1949, 99)—this is how the narrator opens his description of the expulsion, and immediately "cuts" to the voices of those being expelled and their point of view, through which he defines himself and his comrades: "And the child too was sobbing a kind of stiff-lipped 'what-have-you-done-to-us'. It suddenly seemed as if she were the only one who knew exactly what was happening […] It was as though there were an outcry in their gait, a kind of sullen accusation: Damn you […] Exalted in their pain and sorrow above our—wicked—existence they went on their way" (99–100).

Later, he watches the expulsion, and describes it in terms of his own personal and historical memories:

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 was what exile looked like. (100) […] They had played on all my nerves. Our nation's protest to the world: Exile...