Who is Afraid of Khirbet Khizeh ? A Microhistory of Audio-visual Anxiety

ABSTRACT: In 1978 Israeli director Ram Loevy adapted S. Yizhar's novel Khirbet Khizeh into a film made for television. The film, portrayed the story of the IDF's expulsion of the residents of an Arab village during the 1948 war, was produced by the government-funded Israel Broadcasting Authority. This article delves into the tumultuous reception of the film in Israel, employing a thorough analysis of primary historical sources. Drawing from a corpus of paratexts, including production records, petitions, op-eds, official transcripts, and personal correspondence, this study seeks to shed light on a range of voices, including those sometimes overlooked in the historiography of Israeli film and television, such as religious audiences, Mizrahim, women, and Arabs. The article contends that the public discourse on Khirbet Khizeh was characterized by audio-visual anxiety related both to the adaptation of a work of literature to an audio-visual format and to the Israeli public's fear of adopting a perspective that challenged the overarching Zionist narrative at a time of escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It demonstrates a discrepancy between the anxiety of the influence of the audio-visual medium and the medium's actual ability to shape the historical consciousness of spectators.