The airstrike on January 18 that killed Hezbollah and Iranian soldiers, allegedly undertaken by the IDF, has been surprisingly welcomed with cheers by many in the Middle East.
The strike destroyed a convoy carrying senior Hezbollah commanders and an Iranian military team headed by a general in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, who were secretly travelling near the Israeli border in Syria’s Quneitra region of the Golan Heights.
In an editorial titled “How did we end up cheering for Israel?” published Wednesday in the influential pan-Arab newspaper A-Sharq al-Awsat, Abd al-Rahman Al-Rashed, the general manager of Al-Arabiya television, wrote:
The cheering for this act on social networking platforms is an expression of anger and indignation, and we’ve even sensed these feelings expressed by sympathizers with Islamist groups.
According to Al-Rashed, this joy over the blow suffered by Hezbollah and Iran represents a huge change of feelings about Hezbollah, due to its heinous actions in targeting its rivals in Lebanon and its involvement in the Syrian civil war, where several thousand Hezbollah troops are supporting dictator Bashar al-Assad in the killing of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians. “Many of those who have shifted from admiring Hezbollah to hating the group did so in less than a decade,” he wrote.
These people used to support Hezbollah in Lebanon in the past and they used to adopt the Shi’ite group’s political and military agenda. Anger began to surface when Hezbollah’s militias occupied west Beirut during the events of May 7, 2008, three years after the party’s involvement in the assassination of Sunni leader Rafik al-Hariri.
Hezbollah, and also Iran, have lost the respect and status they’ve always enjoyed in the name of Islam, Lebanon and Palestine. Hezbollah’s biggest fall came after its clear sectarian bias in Syria emerged when its members joined the terrible war there, which has killed more than 250,000 people in what is surely the most shameful crime in the history of the region. Iranian involvement in Syria will also have further repercussions.
Al-Rashed sees no doubt that if a confrontation occurs between Israel and Hezbollah, or between Israel and Iran, many Arabs will pray for the defeat of Hezbollah’s militias and the generals of its Iranian ally.
In case a regional struggle happens, like an Arab struggle with Iran, and Israel is an apparent party in the Arab camp, people will, I believe, turn a blind eye to a temporary alliance under the principle of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend.’
Other Arab media outlets and publicists also used the Quneitra attack to criticize Hezbollah due of its involvement in Syria. Cartoonists portrayed Hezbollah as the one responsible for the incident in return for its destructive activities in Syria, as seen here, here, and here.
[Photo: M Asser / Flickr, illustration]