“A Meat Locker in Hebron”: Meat Eating, Occupation, and Cruelty in To the End of the Land
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I explore the connections between meat-eating, cruelty, and the Israeli/Palestinian crisis in Israeli author David Grossman's 2008 novel To the End of the Land (translated from the Hebrew in 2010 by Jessica Cohen). Using the radical vegetarian-feminist theories of Carol J. Adams, I argue that in the novel, Grossman reveals how the Israeli nation-state's treatment of the occupied Palestinian people is part and parcel of the same ideological construct that allows its citizens to consume the flesh of dead animals; if a nation can eat meat, it can dehumanize and oppress its unwanted others. In particular, I look at a pivotal moment in the novel, where the protagonist Ora's son's military unit leaves an elderly Palestinian man chained up and suffering in a Hebron meat locker; I locate this event as the most important physical space in a novel preoccupied with space, land, and physicality. I also look at another example of a Jewish author grappling with the cruelty of eating meat, the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer's short story "The Slaughterer." Finally, I interrogate the idea, put forward by Todd Hasak-Lowy, that Grossman is less concerned with the sufferings of the Palestinian people than he is the sufferings of the stoic Israeli, forced to make compromising moral choices.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".