It’s fine to have empathy for your adversary, but in the end, in some situations, either they go or you die.
When the United States was founded, Tory sympathizers shipped out because they knew what was good for them.
Nearly 70 years ago, an intelligence officer with the newly formed state of Israel moved with a group of soldiers into a Palestinian village whose women, children and old people were rounded up, herded into trucks and sent across the border. The village was demolished to make way for the new Jewish state. The deportation was a small piece of the Palestinian exodus — some of it at gunpoint, some of it not — that accompanied the upheavals of the birth of Israel in 1947 and 1948.
We don’t know the name of the village that the intelligence officer, Yizhar Smilansky, moved into that day, or exactly what he saw. But the events he witnessed so haunted Smilansky that he wrote a novella about his experience and gave it the same name as the fictional place where he set his story: “Khirbet Khizeh.” The book, published in Hebrew in 1949 under the pen name S. Yizhar, became a landmark of Israeli literature, sparking debate over successive generations about the events that attended the formation of the Jewish state; it has been part of the curriculum of Israel’s schools. Remarkably, “Khirbet Khizeh” was translated into English only in 2008, and it wasn’t published in Britain until 2011; it has now been brought to the United States for the first time by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. (Smilansky died in 2006.)
