Re-Thinking the Figure of the Humanitarian: Sahar Khalifeh’s The End of Spring and the Function of Human Rights Narrative
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I analyze the figure of the humanitarian in Khalifeh’s novel, The End of Spring, which depicts events during the 2002 siege of the West Bank. Drawing upon Slaughter's theory of humanitarian reading, as well as Fassin and Mahrouse regarding the role of the humanitarian as witness, I critique the presumed responsibility of the Western humanitarian to represent the suffering of others, contrasting this with Khalifeh’s representation of Ahmad’s practice of photography. Further, I analyze the way in which Ahmad’s role as an ambulance driver troubles the presumption of humanitarian neutrality, as well as the ideal of transcending difference to honor human dignity. Conforming to neither a sentimental reading practice aimed at empathy or a practice of readerly identification with the savior-figure, this analysis provides lessons for thinking about the 2018 attacks on medics in Gaza during the Great March of Return demonstrations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".