Only In Israel

"The bill's aim is to prevent prisoners and organizations from exerting pressure on Israel by means of a hunger strike."
"They use such strikes to try to stop administrative detentions and obtain easing of restrictions ... The State's interest is for no prisoner to die as a result of a hunger strike."
Israeli Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch

"Every day, the number of hunger-striking prisoners sent from the prisons to the hospitals is growing. Treating them presents a special challenge that doctors have hitherto not encountered on such a scale."
Dr. Leonid Eidelman, director, Israel Medical Association

"We should definitely permit prisoners to engage in hunger strikes to protect their grievances, since at times that might be the only way to bring the situation to the public."
"But we must make it clear to them up front that under no circumstances will we allow them to endanger their lives and health; that when they reach a state of danger to themselves they will be hospitalized and fed even against their express will."
Shimon Glick, professor of medicine, Ben Gurion University

"Prisoners cannot be forced to eat against their will as long as they are conscious and continue to refuse. A hunger strike is a tool that prisoners use to try to protest and influence public opinion. Silencing that tool would violate the prisoner's freedom of expression."
Amir Fuchs, Israel Democracy Institute

The debate rages, with differences of opinion among government, the medical community and academia over how best to address a growing problem in Israeli prisons, of prisoners held for crimes against the State of Israel, seeking to protest their incarceration as part of the "resistance", against the enemy "occupation"; of a nation that sits on land ancestrally their own, but which another ethnic/religious group claims for their own.

Israel is prepared to place a controversial bill into law permitting force-feeding of prisoners staging hunger strikes. Having passed its first reading, the final vote presents as 82 Palestinian prisoners have been moved from prisons to Israeli hospitals for care after refusing to eat for over 50 days, taking only vitamin pills and water. They will be honoured as martyrs for the great cause of creating an assault against the enemy. The propaganda value cannot be overstated.

This, as the opportunity for both groups to have possession of their own geographies side by side, without rancour, without antipathy leading to violent attacks grows less and less likely to occur as the passage of time helps to set in stone the hatreds and divisions resulting from refusals to settle for peace instead of violent actions and reactions.

And while Palestinians dedicated to their concept of justice which includes destroying the presence of a state they don't approve of, mount violent attacks against Israelis, the authorities who imprison them for these crimes agonize over  how best to ensure the prisoners refrain from committing voluntary suicide in favour of martyrdom.

IDF forces in Hebron move through the deserted streets in search of three abducted Israeli teens by Hamas terrorists in Operation Brother’s Keeper. (Photo: IDF)

While the Israel Defence Forces are desperately combing the geography of the West Bank for any hopeful signs that three kidnapped Israeli teens have not yet been murdered, but are being held for ransom of prisoners, and the entire country is on tenterhooks of agony over their fate, the terrorist group Hamas which administers the Gaza Strip applauds the brave action of whoever it was (declining to take ownership of the event) who courageously placed the lives of three Jewish youth in jeopardy, as a selfless act of "resistance".

While with rare exception, such as Canada, which has expressed its solidarity with Israel, the international community remains unmoved over the matter of yet another violent strike against Israelis, Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa are slaughtering one another without let-up as vicious fanatical Islamist jihadists have embarked on a mission to make the desert run red with blood.

It is not only the Islamist militias who slaughter, but as in Syria, a blood-thirsty tyrant who has matched their gruesome tactics in mass murder on his own civilian population.

In Israel, the concern is how to secure life; in the greater Middle East and North Africa where Islam prevails, the issue is one of Islamist sectarian and tribal antipathy of such virulence that Muslim slaughters Muslim with impunity.