In 1949, he published the novella "Khirbet Khizeh", in which he described the fictional expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their fictional village by the IDF during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. It became a best-seller and in 1964 was included in the Israeli high school curriculum. In 1978, a controversy arose after a dramatization of "Khirbet Khizeh" by director Ram Loevy was aired on Israeli television. Shapira has lamented that, despite the publishing of Yizhar's novella decades earlier, Benny Morris was able, when he published "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949" in 1988, to announce "himself as the man who had laid bare the original sin of the State of Israel".