JERUSALEM - OCTOBER 28: Likud Party leader and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers a speech to supporters at the Likud campaign headquarters following the release of exit polls and initial results of the general election in Jerusalem on October 28, 2026. Saeed Qaq / Anadolu (Photo by Saeed Qaq / ANADOLU / Anadolu via AFP)
Watch Lebanese social media today and you would think Beirut had its own polling station in Tel Aviv. Hot takes, exit-poll threads, victories declared in advance. The Lebanese are following Israel’s election as if their names were on the ballot. In a sense, they are. Just not how they imagine.
Today, reportedly more than 2.5 million votes are already cast, and midday turnout was the highest for that hour since 1973. Arab citizens of Israel are flooding polling stations, and stations will stay open past closing time for those still in line. This vote reaches far beyond Israel: from the Middle East to Washington, everyone is holding their breath. Israelis are queuing to decide the region’s future. Lebanese are queuing on Twitter to decide it for them.
The favorite sport is rooting against Benjamin Netanyahu. But ask the Lebanese cheering for his fall one simple question: and then what?
The favorite sport is rooting against Benjamin Netanyahu. But ask the Lebanese cheering for his fall one simple question: and then what?
Then comes Gadi Eisenkot. As Israel’s Northern Command chief in 2008, he told an Israeli newspaper that what happened in Beirut’s Dahiyeh in 2006 would happen in every village from which Israel is fired upon. Disproportionate force, great destruction. These are not civilian villages, he said, but military bases. That is the Dahiyeh doctrine, and he is its author. Today he leads his own party, says Hezbollah is rebuilding, and speaks of a buffer zone roughly eight kilometers deep along the border.
Read that again, you who cheer “anyone but Bibi.” The alternative is not a dove. It is the man who wrote the playbook for flattening villages. Netanyahu is not the only Israeli who sees south Lebanon as a problem to be solved. He is only the best known.
Read that again, you who cheer “anyone but Bibi.” The alternative is not a dove. It is the man who wrote the playbook for flattening villages. Netanyahu is not the only Israeli who sees south Lebanon as a problem to be solved. He is only the best known.
Some of the loudest voices rooting for Eisenkot, or simply for Netanyahu’s fall, are the same people who claim to oppose Hezbollah. Their logic is simple: Netanyahu is bad for Gaza, so anything is better. A leftist who protests Gaza and forgets what the “better” option means for Nabatieh, Tyre or Dahiyeh has not chosen a side. He has chosen a mood.
So who benefits when Lebanese cheer for Netanyahu’s defeat without reading the alternative? The Iranian axis has spent two years telling Lebanon that Israel is one monolith to be resisted forever, and that only weapons outside the state can protect you. Every Lebanese who frames this election as Bibi versus the world quietly repeats Tehran’s script. Rooting against Netanyahu because Gaza angers you is a moral position. Doing it without noticing that you are standing next to Hezbollah is a political one.
The result is not yet official as I write, and this argument does not need it. I am not endorsing Netanyahu. I am not endorsing Eisenkot. That is for Israelis to decide, as Lebanon’s elections are for Lebanese. My point is simpler: whoever wins, the doctrine that took shape after October 7 stays. Preemption, buffer zones, no rebuilding. The two men differ on tempo and on how much room they give diplomacy, not on direction.
Israel counts its ballots. Lebanon should count what is left of its time.
Which brings me to the only question that matters to Lebanon. Not who wins in Israel, but what Beirut does with the time it has. A state that disarms Hezbollah itself, through the framework on the table, gets a negotiating partner on either side of the Israeli aisle. A state that waits for the Israeli election to decide its fate gets its fate decided for it.
So stop voting in someone else’s election. Start finishing your own homework.
Israel counts its ballots. Lebanon should count what is left of its time.
Elissa E Hachem is a journalist and political writer specializing in regional affairs and governance. Former Regional Media Advisor at the U.S. State Department’s Arabic Regional Media Hub, with broad experience in strategic communication across government and private sectors.
The views in this story reflect those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of NOW.
