In 1981, security prisoners who had taken part in terrorist actions against the British as part of the Irish underground, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), launched a hunger strike as a protest against the fact that Her Majesty’s government revoked their status as “political prisoners”.
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at the time, "Iron Lady" Margaret Thatcher, refused to give in to their demands, and despite the immense pressure stood firm against those pressure and didn’t surrender, even when the Irish prisoners were close to death.
At the end of the ordeal, 10 Irish prisoners died as a result of the hunger strike, and the message Thatcher passed on to the underground was crystal clear: We stand firmly against terrorism.
The British-Irish example can be applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When terrorists sitting in Israeli prisons, called “security detainees”, go on a hunger strike, much like the members of the Irish underground did, the government of Israel, unlike the British government, is looking for every possible way to have their cake and eat it too.
The Israeli government wants to show the Israeli public that it is fighting terrorism at all costs, but it also wants to avoid causing an uproar in the Palestinian public, which is what will happen if one of the prisoners dies as a result of a hunger strike.
There’s nothing we can do about the fact that the State of Israel, the Jewish state, is not the Red Cross, and is not the United Nations. It must clearly and absolutely prefer the uncompromising struggle against terrorism and terrorist leaders. In a move of unprecedented frailty, the government offered the prisoner Mohammed Allan to leave the borders of Israel for 4 years, in exchange for his ending his hunger strike.
The detainee Khader Adnan was released from prison after he too had reached a “life-threatening” state, due to his own hunger strike, all while in the background there was taking place a ridiculous public debate on forced feeding. When Khader Adnan returned home, he overnight became a venerated object of adoration for tens of thousands of Palestinian youths and for all of the arrested terrorists currently in Israeli prisons.
Why should Israel force feed a terrorist who wanted to or didn’t succeed in killing innocent Israelis? If a terrorist wants to take his own life, then the state should not force upon him a life that he himself is not interested in. The responsibility of the State of Israel is first and foremost to its own citizens and to their personal safety.
The State of Israel must stand firm against this terrorism with unflinching and unwavering determinism, even when a terrorist “threatens” to embark on a hunger strike. If he dies, it is not the responsibility of the state of Israel, but is solely the responsibility of the terrorist himself, and the Palestinian public as a whole.
This being the case, terrorists who decide to start a hunger strike should not be force fed, and under no circumstances whatsoever should they be released from prison. Thatcher proved this in the past, there is no reason that the same shouldn’t work this time, too.