{"id":655749,"date":"2026-10-24T12:46:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-24T12:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/655749\/"},"modified":"2026-10-24T12:46:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T12:46:10","slug":"lebanese-sceptical-israeli-polls-will-bring-change-end-occupation-of-south-israel-palestine-conflict","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/655749\/","title":{"rendered":"Lebanese sceptical Israeli polls will bring change, end occupation of south | Israel-Palestine conflict"},"content":{"rendered":"

Beirut, Lebanon \u2013 As Israel\u2019s October 27 election<\/a> nears, so does the possibility that the government that has overseen the invasion and reoccupation of southern Lebanon could be deposed.<\/p>\n

But for people in Lebanon, optimism that a change in the Israeli government will bode well for Israel\u2019s neighbours is low<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think anything major \u2013 or at all \u2013 will change for Lebanon even if there\u2019s a change in [Israeli] leadership,\u201d said Beirut resident Fouad Debs.<\/p>\n

\u201cAny internal change might lead to small, insignificant changes just to show the outside world that Israeli society and politics are not messed up or evil,\u201d added the lawyer.<\/p>\n

For many in Lebanon, Israel\u2019s history of airspace violations, ground invasions and occupation has led to a general atmosphere of distrust, regardless of who is in charge of the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cProof is what people [in Israel] are saying as the elections [approach],\u201d said Karim Safieddine, a Beirut-based nonresident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one is promising withdrawal, and no one is addressing south Lebanon as a crisis or a mistake,\u201d he added, noting that the \u201cgeneral Israeli establishment looks at Lebanon as its prize\u201d.<\/p>\n

Israel and the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah have been fighting, with different levels of intensity, since October 2023 in the wake of the Hamas-led attack in southern Israel and Israel\u2019s genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip that followed it. Israel has twice escalated the conflict \u2013 first in September 2024 and then in March this year, following the start of the United States-Israeli war on Iran.<\/p>\n

In June, following direct negotations that were rejected by Hezbollah, Israel and the Lebanese government signed a US-brokered framework agreement that included the goal of securing the phased withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon. Still, Israel continues to occupy<\/a> large parts of its neighbour\u2019s south, where it has systematically demolished<\/a> homes and infrastructure in dozens of villages, forcing more than one million people from their homes.<\/p>\n

Lebanese generally disagree on how to deal with Israel, as shown by a June 2026 survey by Lebanese American University professor Jad Melki and his team.<\/p>\n

In the study, 54 percent of Lebanese polled said they supported diplomacy with Israel, while 35 percent preferred armed resistance. But the poll also found that regardless of the tactic, Lebanese views of Israel were overwhelmingly negative, with 87 percent of those polled considering it \u201cas their enemy\u201d.<\/p>\n

Netanyahu vs Dahiyeh Doctrine inventor<\/p>\n

In next week\u2019s polls, the primary challenge to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu \u2013 the man who has overseen Israel\u2019s war on Lebanon that has killed almost 9,000 people since October 2023, including journalists, first responders<\/a>\u00a0and children<\/a> \u2013\u00a0appears to be Gadi Eisenkot<\/a>, the leader of the Yashar party.<\/p>\n

Many Israelis see Eisenkot as a break from Netanyahu, who has been inundated with corruption trials<\/a>, accusations of failure to prevent a Hamas-led attack in October 2023<\/a> and of prioritising attacking Gaza over releasing Israeli captives<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But in Lebanon, the general feeling is that whoever replaces Netanyahu is unlikely to deviate from the current policy of occupation and destruction.<\/p>\n

Eisenkot, in particular, is a former general and chief of staff in the Israeli army with a historical impact on Lebanon. He acted as northern front commander in Israel\u2019s 2006 war on Lebanon and is the architect of the Dahiyeh Doctrine, an Israeli military strategy of using disproportionate damage and destruction currently being used by Israel in Gaza and Lebanon.<\/p>\n

More recently, he has accused<\/a> Netanyahu of giving in to US pressure by stopping attacks on Beirut since April, arguing that the Israeli military should attack Hezbollah targets anywhere in Lebanon.<\/p>\n

\u2018Normalised dehumanisation\u2019<\/p>\n

Lebanese analysts said that, although Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes in Gaza, Eisenkot and other challengers have mostly attacked him on domestic issues and from the right<\/a>, calling him soft on issues of security.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose that have come forward as candidates in Israeli elections criticise Netanyahu and his handling of the war,\u201d Elia Ayoub, a Lebanese researcher and podcaster, told Al Jazeera. \u201cThey\u2019re not criticising him based on any kind of humanitarianism or anything [related to] human rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ayoub said the attitude towards Lebanon and other peoples and countries in the region goes beyond the Netanyahu government. He pointed out the governmental<\/a> and societal<\/a> backlash to the recent release of NAZA, a documentary made by Israeli journalists in which Israeli soldiers speak about the calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a profoundly dehumanising discourse that is completely normalised in Israeli society, and the backlash against any pushback is drastic,\u201d said Ayoub. \u201cI don\u2019t necessarily believe that it\u2019s going to change Israeli policy towards Lebanon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since the June trilateral framework agreement, Lebanon appears stuck in a limbo. While active fighting between the two sides has largely stopped, Israel continues<\/a> its demolition campaign with little opposition. As the occupation becomes increasingly entrenched, many Lebanese fear it could last another generation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cDefinitely, it\u2019s a prolonged situation of neither war nor peace,\u201d said Safieddine. \u201cWe\u2019re going to be living in this grey area for a very long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

With next week\u2019s election unlikely to bring any meaningful change to Israel\u2019s policies towards Lebanon and the wider region, Ayoub stressed the importance of the midterm polls in the US on November 3.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe US elections are just as important, if not more important,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause they tend to determine how much the Israelis feel emboldened toward Palestinians first and foremost, but of course, towards Lebanon as well, and Syria to a large extent.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Beirut, Lebanon \u2013 As Israel\u2019s October 27 election nears, so does the possibility that the government that has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":655750,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4410,2664,85,46,48084,286552,44,88,47,43,238],"class_list":["post-655749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-elections","tag-features","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-israel-attacks-lebanon","tag-israel-election-2026","tag-israel-palestine-conflict","tag-lebanon","tag-middle-east","tag-news","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=655749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655749\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/655750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=655749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=655749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=655749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}