Israel Election: What A New Government Could Mean For Saudi Arabia, Syria And Lebanon

As Israeli politicians begin to try to build a coalition government, after an election that saw no clear winner, response from politicians in surrounding Arab countries has been muted or non-existent.

This may be because, for the time being anyway, it remains unclear as to whether the new Israeli government will continue with “business as usual” under incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or whether a new government headed by Netanyahu’s opponents will take what is expected to be a more moderate domestic course.

Whatever the eventual outcome, the consensus is that there is unlikely to be a huge change in Israel’s foreign relations with neighboring countries like Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, and, further afield, the Gulf states. Nor is it likely to produce very different policies toward Palestinians, which many Arab populations in the region feel strongly about.

Both Netanyahu and his main opponent Gadi Eisenkot “are two sides of the same coin,” Egyptian politician Mostafa Bakry wrote on X after exit polls seemed to indicate an Eisenkot victory (something that’s increasingly contested) and Israeli-Arab parties had displaced Netanyahu’s far-right allies. “Arab joy at Netanyahu’s near-failure to form the government does not mean that what is to come … differs greatly from his predecessor.”

“An Eisenkot government would likely be politically fragile, limiting its room for maneuver,” Beth Oppenheim, a policy fellow in the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a commentary last week. “The biggest differences from the current government would be at home: It would halt the judicial overhaul, open a state commission of inquiry into October 7th and pass a conscription law.”

However, Oppenheim explained, “when it comes to foreign policy, there would not be a fundamental transformation. Netanyahu’s post-October 7th security doctrine — pre-empting threats, operating far beyond Israel’s borders and holding ‘buffer zones’ in neighboring territories — has been embraced by nearly all Jewish Israeli parties.”

Palestinian Territories: No two-state solution

One of the election campaign posters for Netanyahu’s Likud party bore a stark message — “The right or Palestine” — the message being that if voters did not choose Netanyahu and his right-wing allies, his opponents would be too accommodating toward Israel’s Arab-led political parties and would be open to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

But observers believe that message is exaggerated, and that the two-state solution is already dead.

“Support for Palestinian statehood has collapsed across most of the Jewish political spectrum, and permanent Israeli control over Palestinians has become normalized,” Oppenheim pointed out. With the exception of one party, “all mainstream Jewish parties support, or at least acquiesce in, the settlement enterprise in some form and publicly oppose a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines.”

In August this year, Eisenkot himself said that, “there is no Palestinian state, and no Palestinian state will be established under the government we form.”

An Eisenkot-led government would, however, cooperate with more left-wing Israeli parties, which have previously supported a two-state solution. Any new coalition may also need the backing of Israel’s Arab-led parties, who are currently thought to have increased their seats in parliament to around 19.

But as Mairav Zonszein, senior Israel analyst at the International Crisis Group, told the news agency Associated Press this week, “At best, [a new government] would be able to slow down the extremely crazy acceleration that we’ve seen in the last four years of every aspect of Israel’s aggression in the occupied territories and inside Israel itself.”

A less extreme government would tone down religious messaging, might be less demanding when it came to conditions on disarming Hamas in Gaza, and could potentially move forward with the next stage of the Gaza ceasefire, agreed to in late 2025, but barely implemented. It might also do more to contain settler violence in the West Bank.

“That’s because [settler extremism] is a phenomenon that doesn’t enjoy the support of the majority of Israelis, damages Israel’s international reputation, and suppressing it is feasible,” Elizabeth Tsurkov, a senior fellow at the Washington-based think tank, the Middle East Policy Council, explained on social media.

“[A new Israeli government] would keep expanding the settlements and Palestinian statehood would remain taboo,” Oppenheim wrote. “Without a diplomatic track with the Palestinians, further flare-ups of violence in the West Bank and Gaza are inevitable, destabilizing the region — and normalization with Saudi Arabia will remain off the table.”

Saudi Arabia: Could anti-Netanyahu bloc bring normalization?

After the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas and Israel’s ensuing military campaign, which has resulted in at least 70,000 Palestinians killed and Gaza devastated, Saudi Arabia’s conditions for normalization with Israel have hardened.

The country, hugely influential in the Muslim world, has put out several statements saying there could be no path to normalizing relations with Israel without some progress on Palestinian statehood.

Last week, at a meeting of foreign ministers from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt, the Saudis co-signed a communique in which the four countries said Israel was “the fundamental source of instability in the region and beyond.”

But there is some cooperation between the two countries behind the scenes. Analysts say that if a government less hardline than Netanyahu’s gets into power in Israel, it will be easier for countries like Saudi Arabia — but also the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Egypt, which all have varying levels of backchannel cooperation and contact with Israel — to admit to this kind of behind-the-scenes diplomacy.

Syria: Security agreement revived?

According to a study published last week by Syrian think tank, Etana, Israeli troops have come as far as 1,160 kilometers (721 miles) into Syria from the two countries’ disputed border, occupied Syrian land as far as 400 kilometers from it and carried out 1,996 ground operations in southwest Syria between January and September this year.

Before elections this week there was no chance of any kind of withdrawal from Syria because it would have been seen as “defeat,” Ksenia Svetlova, an associate fellow at Chatham House and a former member of the Israeli parliament, told online publication Syria in Transition this month. But if the anti-Netanyahu bloc gets into power, that could change, she suggested.

“A security agreement with Syria will become more probable, as many potential stakeholders [in a new, more centrist Israeli government] have spoken favorably about it in the past,” noted Svetlova, who is also director of the Tel Aviv-based Regional Organization for Peace, Economics and Security, which works on Israeli-Palestinian-Arab partnerships. “However I do expect that it will take time as this government will be constantly attacked by the extreme right.”

For months this year, Israel and Syrian diplomats negotiated a security agreement under the US’ stewardship. But it came to nothing in late 2026 after Israel apparently refused to withdraw back to boundary lines established under a 1974 disengagement agreement.

Lebanon: More diplomacy wanted

Observers and media commentators in Lebanon say the Lebanese government would prefer to have Eisenkot’s anti-Netanyahu bloc in power.

Lebanon and Israel are continuing to negotiate an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, where the Israelis claim they have established a “buffer zone” to facilitate their fight against Lebanese militia group, Hezbollah. The Lebanese argue the Israelis have in fact invaded their country.

And when it comes to negotiations around disarming Hezbollah and withdrawing Israeli troops, there’s a perception in Lebanese political circles that Eisenkot would be easier to deal with than Netanyahu and his extremist allies.

This is despite the fact that Eisenkot is widely seen as the inventor of the so-called “Dahiyeh Doctrine,” a military strategy that calls for asymmetric warfare in areas like Beirut’s southern suburbs, where Hezbollah is based, to pressure both militants and their civilian support base.

A similar strategy is thought to be being implemented in southern Lebanon now, where whole villages continue to be razed by the Israeli military, even as active fighting has subsided.

Lebanese commentators are also optimistic that Eisenkot, former commander of the Israeli army, would have something in common with their own president, Joseph Aoun, who used to head Lebanon’s armed forces.

“When Netanyahu was ousted from power between 2021 and 2022 by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid [now members of the camp led by Eisenkot], we were able to negotiate and conclude the maritime agreement,” a Lebanese official told Lebanese daily, L’Orient Today, referring to a 2022 deal to share offshore territory.

Disclaimer: This report first appeared on Deutsche Welle, and has been republished on ABP Live as part of a special arrangement. Apart from the headline, no changes have been made in the report by ABP Live.