Jerusalem, May 4 - An legislator whose supporters seek the dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state boasted today that before Palestinian Islamic Jihad figure Khader Adnan died this past Tuesday in an Israeli prison hospital, the lawmaker made an attempt to sneak into the detainee's possession a snack known for its status among Palestinians as not counting if eaten during a declared hunger strike.
MK Walid Taha of the Balad Party told confidants Thursday that on one of several visits, he sought to provide the hunger-striking Adnan with a supply of Tortit - a green-wrapped, chocolate-coated wafer that rise to prominence when a cell camera captured a Palestinian terrorist, Marwan Barghouti, surreptitiously devouring one during a hunger strike he had declared in 2017. Advocates rose to Barghouti's defense at the time, refusing to concede that he had violated his commitment - and thus generating precedent for other hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners to adopt similar behavior.
In the end, Taha, recalled, he decided at the last minute not to deliver the wafers because he remained unsure whether the adamant Islamist Adnan would accept Israeli products. "I know Palestinians themselves love Israeli products and buy them all the time," he acknowledged, "but a public figure like Khaled - it wouldn't do to have that awkwardness in the air. So I settled for only encouraging him verbally to continue to kill himself for Palestine."
Adnan died while awaiting trial for incitement to terrorism and membership in a terrorist group. His activities before imprisonment included calling on Palestinians to become suicide bombers against Israeli civilians, and promoting an ideology that demands submission to Islam on pain of death. Taha took advantage of his parliamentary immunity to conduct the visits.
Other Palestine advocates expressed puzzlement that Adnan did not himself resort to the Tortit gambit. "It's possible he really was prepared to die," conceded Omar Shakir of Human Rights Watch. "Weird, but plausible. Also not consistent with every other aspect of Palestine activism, which has always prioritized image and rhetoric over integrity. Palestinian leaders are expected to encourage others to suffer and die while the leadership lives large and takes no personal risks. So excuse my surprise."
Taha declined to say what he did with the Tortit, since no Israelis, even the hundreds of thousands below the poverty line, will admit to eating the mediocre-at-best snack. Experts surmised that Prison Services purchases the bulk of Tortit production from its manufacturer, Elite.
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