Hirbet Hiz'ah

"Hirbet Hiz'ah" is a story by S. Yizhar, published in 1949 by Sifriyat Po'alim. It follows an Israeli military unit ordered, during the War of Independence, to remove the residents of the fictional village of Hirbet Hiz'ah. Through the troubled perspective of one soldier, the story turns a military operation into a moral and human question: what happens when an order collides with the sight of elderly people, women and children being driven from their homes.

The work's importance lies not only in its plot. According to the material preserved in the archive, it was the first Israeli literary work to address this chapter of the state's formation directly. Hirbet Hiz'ah is fictional, but the village represents Arab villages whose residents were expelled during the 1948 war, a period remembered in Palestinian historiography as the Nakba. Yizhar therefore gave Hebrew readers an immediate literary image of displacement years before the subject became a central focus of historical research and public debate.

An Order, a Landscape and a Crisis of Conscience

The story begins with an order to gather residents, load them onto vehicles and move them beyond the lines; to demolish stone houses, burn mud huts, detain young men and suspects, and clear the area of hostile forces. The narrator's unit approaches the village, opens fire toward houses and fleeing people, and eventually encounters residents emerging from hiding and gathering beneath a large sycamore tree.

The soldiers move among the houses and courtyards. They do not directly attack the villagers, yet they participate in the destruction and attempted burning of buildings, while another unit blows up houses nearby. Within the military sequence, Yizhar emphasizes individual human moments: a woman realizing that her home has been destroyed and that she has nowhere to return; a small child boarding a truck; and the gulf between the language of military orders and their human consequences.

The narrator gradually begins to doubt the operation. He argues with himself, and to a lesser extent with his comrades, over whether it is right to remove people from their village. In the afternoon, four trucks arrive and the residents begin to climb aboard. Seeing a woman and a young child, the narrator imagines that the child may grow up shaped by displacement and hatred. As the trucks fill, he reaches the story's defining insight: "Exile. This is what exile looks like."

The story presents the expulsion as morally wrong and repeatedly uses words such as "exile," "expulsion" and "shooting the innocent." It also draws on images associated with Jewish historical memory, including the imagery of trains and exile. This does not equate Jewish and Arab experiences; rather, it confronts readers with the question of how a people carrying memories of persecution and displacement responds to the suffering of others.

A Literary Work Ahead of the Historical Debate

Years after publication, Yizhar explained his motivation in the words: "I felt within me that I had to speak about things I had seen and rebel against them." The statement helps clarify the work's character. It is not a military report or a historical study, but a first-person literary testimony that brings a suppressed experience into public consciousness and makes it impossible to separate national decisions from their human cost.

In later years, historians including Ilan Pappé and Benny Morris examined the War of Independence and the fate of Arab villages. Literature does not replace historical research, but "Hirbet Hiz'ah" played an important early role in preparing the ground for discussion. It allowed readers to imagine displacement through the eyes of someone inside the operation and focused attention on the consequences of national and military decisions for individual people.

Although the village in the story is fictional, a village with a similar name exists in the Gaza Strip. That resemblance contributed to readings of the story against a real geographical and historical background. Its lasting power, however, comes from the way it turns a fictional place into a symbol of displacement, guilt, memory and responsibility.

Translations and Cultural Influence

The story has been translated into numerous languages. The Arabic translation by Tawfiq Fayyad appeared in Beirut in 1981; Ruth Achlama's German translation appeared in Frankfurt in 1997; Dalia Padoa's Italian translation appeared in Turin in 2005; and the English translation by Nicholas de Lange and Yaakov Dweck appeared in Jerusalem in 2008. The work was also translated into Spanish, French, Norwegian, Dutch and Danish. This range of translations reflects its ability to move beyond its Israeli setting and enter wider conversations about war, refugees, responsibility and memory.

The story also influenced visual art. The Israeli painter Mordecai Ardon created the painting "Hirbet Hiz'ah" in response to the work. The painting was acquired by the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and exhibited there. After Ardon received the UNESCO Prize in 1954, UNESCO produced thousands of reproductions of the painting and distributed them internationally. The story thus acquired a second form, one that gave the experience of displacement a visual presence beyond the Hebrew literary sphere.

The Television Adaptation and the Debate over Artistic Freedom

In 1978, "Hirbet Hiz'ah" was adapted into a television drama for Israel's Channel One, directed by Ram Levi. The planned broadcast provoked a major public debate. Two central questions were at stake: whether public television should produce a work about the expulsion of Arab residents and the conduct of the Israel Defense Forces, and whether the events depicted represented the historical scale of expulsions during the war.

The Speaker of the Knesset asked Walter Eytan, chairman of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, to postpone the broadcast. Education Minister Zvulun Hammer convened a meeting of the authority's management and announced that the broadcast would be delayed until after a Knesset discussion. Attorney Amnon Zichroni petitioned the High Court of Justice against the postponement, but the court declined to consider the petition before the Broadcasting Authority had reached its own decision. Broadcasting Authority employees protested what they saw as political interference in the authority's independence and darkened the broadcast window during which the film had originally been scheduled.

The drama was eventually broadcast following a decision by the Broadcasting Authority's board. The Knesset Education Committee held five sessions on the matter and ultimately determined that the principle of artistic freedom could not be overturned. At the same time, it called on the Broadcasting Authority to prepare a comprehensive series on the history of the Zionist struggle and the justice of the national enterprise, and to give appropriate expression to views prevalent in the public. The episode demonstrated how a literary work could continue to shape public life long after publication, and how art can test a society while expanding the questions it is willing to discuss.

"Hirbet Hiz'ah" was republished many times, including in approximately ten collections of S. Yizhar's stories. Each reprinting and adaptation extended the work's life and brought its questions to new generations of readers, viewers and artists.

Why Hirbet Hiz'ah Belongs in Moreshet

"Hirbet Hiz'ah" merits a place in the archive because it is more than a story about the War of Independence. It changed the terms in which Israeli society could look at power, responsibility and the human cost of state formation. It brought the experience of people driven from their homes into Hebrew literature while placing readers inside the troubled consciousness of a soldier carrying out an order.

Its influence can be traced across several fields: in the translations that carried it abroad, in Mordecai Ardon's painting, in the television adaptation that prompted a principled debate over artistic freedom, and in the repeated publications that kept it within Israeli cultural life. Its significance also lies in the tension it preserves — between Jewish memory and the suffering of another people, between security and morality, and between the national story and the experience of the individual.

For these reasons, Hirbet Hiz'ah is an important subject for Moreshet and Moreshet.com. It preserves not only a major literary work, but also a record of literature's ability to shape Jewish and Israeli memory, stimulate reflection on human responsibility, and connect culture, history and society.