There is a word that describes what is unfolding across screens in the Middle East at night: Schadenfreude. The feeling of immense, indescribable pleasure to see your enemy suffer pain, destruction, and death.

When Iranian missiles arc across the skies over Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Eilat—trails of fire cutting through the dark, Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, a great swath of people across the globe, do not watch in fear or terror, but in thrilling exultation. Phones glow in living rooms from Beirut to Baghdad, from Amman to distant corners of the Muslim world. Bloggers, popcorn in hand, narrate the spectacle in real time and colorful language, their voices rising, urging viewers to celebrate, to chant, to scream with joy as every missile strikes Tel Aviv, turning destruction into a kind of communal ritual.

They are not watching the war. They are watching retribution. This is what decades of brutality and misery do. This is what Gaza has done.

They are not watching the war. They are watching retribution. This is what decades of brutality and misery do. This is what Gaza has done.

For years, images of flattened neighbourhoods, of broken children pulled from rubble, of entire families erased in seconds, have circulated with shocking regularity. The destruction became routine. The outrage dulled our senses. The language of “precision” and “self-defence” drained the incomparable horror of its meaning. What remained was a ledger of suffering—one-sided, unrelenting, unanswered.

For a brief moment, it seems as if the ledger is balanced and the debt has been repaid, though not completely. The account remains unsettled for now and will be for decades to come.

A missile cannot distinguish between a sinner and a saint. It carries no moral weight—only kinetic power. For those left digging through the dust of their homes, the distinction between military goals and murder is irrelevant. They don’t see a “strategic move”; they see an eye for an eye. They don’t hear “official policy”; they hear the suffocating gasps and the screams that preceded the silence. They hear echoes and remember the screams of children, the broken bones of seniors, and school girls gasping for air. The message is clear: “Let them feel it, let them suffer as our brothers and sisters suffered in Gaza. Don’t expect sympathy or tears. You have destroyed our capacity for empathy and compassion.

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Chris Hedges once wrote that war turns human beings into what they most despise. It deforms the moral imagination. It replaces empathy with appetite. The longer it endures, the more it erodes the ability to distinguish between justice and vengeance. That erosion is now visible.

Celebrating destruction is not a sign of strength. It is a symptom of moral injury. It reveals how deeply violence has seeped into the collective psyche. It shows a region not only wounded, but reshaped by its wounds. What we are witnessing is a contagion.

Celebrating destruction is not a sign of strength. It is a symptom of moral injury. It reveals how deeply violence has seeped into the collective psyche. It shows a region not only wounded, but reshaped by its wounds. What we are witnessing is a contagion.

The language shifts first. Words like “retaliation,” “balance,” and “deserved.” Then the horrendous images follow—burning buildings, shattered streets, civilians running. And then, quietly, the line disappears. The line that once separated witnessing from endorsing, grief from gratification, vanishes.

And in its place is something colder taking shape: the normalization of suffering as spectacle. The numbing of senses and the search for distraction away from the scenery of gore and mutilation.

This is the final chapter of war; not the territory it captures nor the governments it topples, but the way it colonizes the human spirit. It teaches people to cheer. It convinces them that pain, when redirected, becomes justice.

The Iranian missiles that streak across the night sky of the Middle East do not end the violence. They extend it. They carry with them the logic of endless return: this strike is for that assault, and that damage for this mayhem, an arithmetic of blood that never resolves.

The Iranian missiles that streak across the night sky of the Middle East do not end the violence. They extend it. They carry with them the logic of endless return: this strike is for that assault, and that damage for this mayhem, an arithmetic of blood that never resolves.

And yet, for a moment, the illusion holds. For a moment, those watching feel a sense of vindication. Not peace. Not justice. But a grim satisfaction that the suffering is no longer one-sided. The sky over Tel Aviv and Eilat now burns, and a thrilling sense of revenge sweeps across the land. Israel is burning just like we did. It is a fragile illusion. It will not last.

Because the truth is simpler, and more brutal: no one “wins” this exchange. Not the ones under bombardment. Not the ones cheering from afar. Not the region trapped in its cycles. War does not deliver justice. It delivers repetition. But we are captive to this cycle, and we cannot see the exit sign.

The real tragedy is not that people feel this surge of dark satisfaction. It is that they have been pushed, over years and decades, to a place where such feelings seem natural, where empathy has been replaced by exhaustion, where outrage has hardened into indifference—or worse, into appetite.

This is what prolonged violence does. It empties the soul of restraint. And once that restraint is gone, once suffering becomes something to be measured, compared, even celebrated, the descent is complete. The night sky may still burn. The screens will still glow. The voices will still rise. But what is being consumed is no longer just war. It is the last remnants of our shared humanity.

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