“Eat a sandwich”: Israeli media mock UK anti-genocide hunger-strikers

Israel’s Jerusalem Post has published an article about hunger-striking political prisoners in the UK, headlined “‘Hungry? Eat a sandwich’: Palestine Action protesters hospitalized as hunger strike exceeds 40 days”. Supporters of the eight prisoners have condemned the headline as a mockery of the detainees’ principled protest and a trivialisation of the danger they face, as well as of their long imprisonment without trial. Several of the strikers have not eaten for forty days or more; five have been hospitalised.

As MintPress News notes:

the article title echoes an advertisement used by Israeli Pizza Hut in 2017 to mock a Palestinian prisoner hunger strike.

The Pizza Hut ad led to widespread fury and calls for a boycott of the brand, especially in Arab nations.

Hunger strikers stand firm

The article from the Jerusalem Post quotes far-right UK MP Rupert Lowe, who posted on X last week that:

I’d like to state on the record that I have no sympathy whatsoever for the Palestine lunatics on hunger strike begging for attention.

Get over yourselves. Hungry? Eat a sandwich.

We don’t care.

The government of Keir Starmer is continuing and escalating the UK state’s war on journalism and political activism against Israel’s genocide in Gaza; journalists and campaigners, many of them Jewish, have been raided and arrested for speaking out, prosecutions against some have failed and others are ongoing. The government has been exposed involving Israel in decisions about prosecutions.

Starmer has particularly targeted Palestine Action and banned the group as a terrorist organisation, to condemnation from legal experts, human rights groups and even the UK’s intelligence services. To justify the ban, his then-Home Secretary Yvette Cooper lied extensively about the nature of the group’s activities and aims, claiming falsely that it had was planning violent campaigns, , while UK police are knowingly ignoring the law to use the proscription as an excuse to arrest or harass people unconnected to the group.

The Starmer regime has used anti-terror laws to imprison the ‘Filton 24’ group, of which the hunger-strikers were members, for more than a year without trial, despite being arrested before Palestine Action was banned – and not being charged with any terror offences. The government and UK media continue to ignore both the political imprisonment and the hunger strikes, while ‘justice secretary’ David Lammy even claimed never to have heard of the strike.

Featured image via the Canary