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 s ...