Israel's mockery of the Filton hunger strikers exposes their own contempt, but also their own fear and weakness. Right, so you know exactly what you’re dealing with when a newspaper in Israel looks at people more than forty days into a hunger strike and decides the right response is a headline telling them to “eat a sandwich.” You don’t get that from a society grappling with the seriousness of starvation; you get it from one that has trained itself to treat other people’s suffering as background noise. And when several of those hunger strikers are now in hospital, with one deteriorating sharply overnight, the joke doesn’t just fall flat — it tells you everything about who is speaking. Because only a culture that’s spent years mocking the hunger of others could pretend this is clever. It isn’t clever. It’s contempt wearing a smirk, and they were so pleased with themselves, they were proud enough to print it. Right, so you don’t get a headline like this one from the Jerusalem Post by ac by accident, and you don’t get it from a publication that pretends to operate in a moral vacuum, you get it from a political culture that has spent years teaching itself that some forms of suffering matter and others don’t, and the dividing line isn’t humanity, it’s allegiance. When an Israeli newspaper looks at people who have refused food for more than forty days and decides the appropriate framing is a jeer dressed up as journalism - 'Hungry? Eat a sandwich': Palestine Action protesters hospitalized as hunger strike exceeds 40 days - you’re not seeing a rogue decision or a misread of the moment, you’re seeing a system talking to itself, reassuring its own audience that the humanity of these hunger strikers is irrelevant, because the story was never about them in the first place. It’s about protecting a narrative that cannot survive even a moment of empathy directed at the wrong people, which is why the contempt comes so quickly and so confidently.