In the wake of the alleged Israeli assault on thousands of Hezbollah members, whose pagers and walkie talkies simultaneously exploded on Monday and Tuesday, Arab governments rushed to condemn the attack, expressing fears that it would escalate the region's conflict.
Yet many of their citizens had other ideas.
In the days following the explosions, Arabic-language social media have been full of memes of Hassan Nasrallah, the militant group's chief, with a blown-up backside; schadenfreude remarks of how Hezbollah got what it deserved; claims that the explosions were divine justice and songs praising the operation. In Northern Syria, soldiers even handed out sweets to passing cars to celebrate the "Hezbollah massacre."
This isn't the first time since the Iran-backed terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7 that Arabs have cheered on brazen operations—allegedly—pulled off by the Jewish state against Iran and its allies. Indeed, according to The Media Line, a U.S.-based independent news agency that reports on Arabic and Hebrew-language media, the Arab world largely favored the assassination of Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr in July and some Arab commentators even supported Israel's assassination of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh last month. When Israel bombed the Houthi-controlled Hodeida port in Yemen, Saudi and Yemeni journalists and social media users rejoiced.
One of the many important nuances of the Middle East conflicts is that most victims of Iran and its proxies and clients such as Hezbollah and Hamas are not Jews but Arabs.
In Syria, Iran has propped up the despotic president Bashar Al Assad, who has used barrel bombs and chemical weapons against his own people, ethnically cleansed certain Sunni districts and strengthened violent and criminal militias such as Hezbollah and the ethnic-Afghan militia Liwa Fatemiyoun.
In Yemen, Iran-backed Houthis have torn the country apart, abusing their citizens and prioritizing fighting a faraway Israel while almost 3 million Yemeni children are either acutely or severely malnourished.
Lebanon, once known as the "Switzerland of the Middle East" for its snowcapped mountains and stability that led to it being the banking capital of the Arab world, has been hijacked by Iran and put on the brink of a war with Israel that would send it back to the Stone Age.