People in Lebanon turn to dark humour to cope with sonic booms from warplanes

‘Very demure, very cutesy’ and ‘low budget’ – these are some of the ‘reviews’ of sonic booms caused by Israeli jets breaking the sound barrier in Lebanon.

Tired of the constant roar of warplanes, amid the ongoing fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, people in Lebanon are turning to humour as a coping mechanism.

It is like placing a plaster on a bullet wound – but it is one of the ways to fight the psychological warfare instilling a sense of powerlessness across the nation.

Now a new website called jidarsot.com has been created, where people can rate the sonic booms they have experienced – just like reviewing a restaurant on Trip Advisor or Google.

‘It is like they are not even trying anymore. They lost passion,’ said one user from Beirut about a sonic boom they heard on Monday.

A number of people have also described the latest sonic booms as ‘Very demure, very cutesy’, using a recent TikTok trend.

‘The windows did not even shake , just terrible,’ another reviewer wrote, adding a rating of one out of 10.

A user in Beirut said: ‘The sound of my husband’s farts is louder than today’s sonic boom.’

‘By the beach, laying on my back, listening to it out in the open always hits better than within closed doors,’ another review read.

In Lebanon – a small Middle Eastern country where people have been exposed to war, displacement and extreme poverty for years – dark humour is often used as a generational defence mechanism.

For many, this is also an opportunity to ridicule Israel’s attempts at instilling fear in people.

Reviews have been pouring in from Beirut, Baalbek, Mount Lebanon and the south of the country, which has seen the worst fighting with Israeli forces since October 2023.

Jidarsot.com, which translates to ‘sonic boom’, is also receiving much attention on X.

Sylvain Perdigon, an anthropologist based in Beirut, wrote: ‘In Lebanon, somebody set up a website where you can rate the near daily sonic booms of Israeli war jets above us as if it was underwear you bought on Amazon or the salad you just ate on Yelp.’

The website was set up as Israel launched the largest airstrikes across Lebanon on Sunday, hitting 40 Hezbollah sites in what it described as ‘an act of self-defence’.

In a statement, the Israeli military accused the Iran-backed group of ‘preparing to fire missiles and rockets toward Israeli territory’ in the early hours of this morning.

Hezbollah responded several hours later, deploying a large number of drones and rockets in response for the killing of its top commander, Fuad Shukr, in a suburb in Beirut last month.

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