A classic work of modern Hebrew literature, this short novel raises uncomfortable questions about the 1948 War of Independence. What does it mean for a people with a long history in the wilderness of exile then to exile another people? And what will be the consequences of the victory that for the Palestinians became known as Al-Naqba, the Catastrophe? These are the kinds of questions that arise in a young soldier's mind as he and his fellow soldiers empty a village of its inhabitants. Here are the sight and sounds and smells of war. “And silence had not yet settled,” Yizhar thinks in a yard in which all the tasks of the morning have stopped abruptly, “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 still be straightened out and restored to the way they had been before.” But that moment passed, and Khirbet Khizeh is the disquieting record of its aftermath.