How Israel lost its way and how Trump can save Lebanon.

Family members grieve as a convoy of ambulances carrying the coffins of their loved ones arrive in the southern Lebanese village of Bazourieh for a mass funeral, on Monday, April 20, 2026. Families gathered for the funeral of nine people — both Hezbollah fighters and civilians — who were killed in recent weeks. (David Guttenfelder/The New York Times)

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

If you are looking for two pictures that summarize where Israel’s geopolitical strategy under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has taken the country, you could not do better than a couple of snapshots featured over the weekend in the Israeli press. The first is a photograph of an Israeli soldier using a sledgehammer to smash a statue of Jesus in Debel, a Maronite Christian village in south Lebanon a few miles north of the Israeli border.

The picture, the Times of Israel diplomatic reporter Lazar Berman wrote, “so perfectly encapsulated some of the worst tropes about Israel and Jews that many instinctively assumed it was an AI-generated product meant to slander the Jewish state. Friends of Israel who thought the photograph might be real prayed it wasn’t, so damaging was the picture. Their prayers went unanswered. An IDF soldier had indeed taken a hammer to the face of a statue depicting Jesus.” He added, “There was no AI, no manipulation, no getting around an image that points to a deep moral morass” in the military and Israeli society.

The second is a picture in Haaretz of a group of beaming right-wing Israeli ministers as they opened a newly reestablished settlement, Sa-Nur, in the northern West Bank. It is one of four isolated Israeli settlements plunked down in the region that lies under Palestinian civilian and security authority. The idea behind these settlements is to make it impossible for a contiguous Palestinian state to ever be established. As Haaretz noted, Bibi’s defense minister, Israel Katz, boasted at the ceremony of the government’s expected legalization of around 140 West Bank farm outposts — to foil any “Palestinian attempts to establish a presence in the area.”

Just another day of the Netanyahu government playing President Donald Trump for a fool. This is the Trump who declared in September 2025: “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank.”

Why are these two pictures so revealing? They are the perfect representations of Netanyahu’s strategy today, if one can call it a strategy: Meet every threat around you by smashing it with a sledgehammer, no matter how many enemies of Israel it makes, and offer no creative ideas for translating military achievements into lasting strategic gains — not in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank or with Saudi Arabia and Iran.

That is because for Israel to consolidate any strategic gains, it needs to be at least trying to produce a two-state solution with the Palestinian Authority. That is what would sustainably isolate Iran across the region. That is what would make normalization of Israeli-Saudi relations, including trade and tourism, possible. That is what would make it so much easier — and less dangerous — for the Lebanese and Syrian governments to make a formal peace with the Jewish state. And that is something Netanyahu refuses to even attempt and constantly works to undermine.

Do I think it would be easy? Of course not. Do I think the Palestinians have an aged, corrupt leadership that needs replacing, energizing and reforming — and have plenty to answer for themselves for their own plight? I sure do. But do I know that Netanyahu has dedicated his entire premiership to obstructing the emergence of a more credible, decent Palestinian leadership? I sure do, as well.

Do I know that Israel has a fundamental interest in trying in every way possible to separate from the Palestinians, lest it end up as a Jewish-run apartheid state? Absolutely. Do I believe that Iran and its proxies pose a lethal threat to Israel that could not be ignored? Again, absolutely. But do I also believe that without a Palestinian partner, it looks to the world that Bibi’s strategy is to make Israel safe for ethnic cleansing of the West Bank — and that this is losing Israel its best friends everywhere? You bet I do.

Dear Israel: When centrist, longtime pro-Israel Democrats in the United States like Rahm Emanuel go on “Real Time With Bill Maher,” as he did last week, and state to overwhelming audience applause that they oppose subsidized U.S. military aid to Israel and question its “special” status, you’re indeed running out of friends. It is not only on the left. More and more Americans across the spectrum see Netanyahu’s Israel as a spoiled child, and they’re just fed up with it.

Of course, the Israeli government and army command condemned the soldier who smashed the Jesus statue in south Lebanon and punished those involved. Indeed, recognizing what a PR disaster it was, Israel rushed to replace the statue. But where do you think that soldier got it into his head that this would be OK — something worth having another member of his unit take a picture of? I will tell you where he got the idea: watching and listening to the language and actions of Bibi’s own government, army and online poison machine.

What would some fresh strategic thinking about Israel and Lebanon look like? Well, let’s start with the fact that Israel, by my count, has mounted at least seven long-term invasions or extensive military operations in south Lebanon, against either the PLO or Hezbollah, since I first came to Beirut as a reporter in 1979.

Let me be clear: No Israeli prime minister would or should allow Iran’s mercenaries in Lebanon, that is, the Hezbollah militia, to render northern Israel uninhabitable by the threat of rocket attacks. But at some point, the dictum that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” really has to apply.

Israel keeps saying the Lebanese army needs to disarm Hezbollah. But the Lebanese army is a mix of Christians, Druze, Sunnis and Shiites. Given Hezbollah’s political grip on the Lebanese Shiite community — even with the anger many Lebanese Shiites feel toward Hezbollah today for provoking Israel on behalf of Iran — if the Lebanese army went into open warfare across south Lebanon and in Beirut against Hezbollah, it could splinter and plunge Lebanon back into civil war. The only alternative Netanyahu has offered is driving tens of thousands of Lebanese out of south Lebanon or Shiite areas of Beirut.

It is time for a third way. I am happy to call it the Trump Plan to Save Lebanon. Push Israel to pull entirely out of south Lebanon and have heavily armed NATO troops help take over the area in partnership with, and under the symbolic authority of, the Lebanese army.

Israel can trust NATO. Hezbollah and Iran will not dare take them on — or if they do, they will be smashed, and a vast majority of Lebanese, including Shiites, will applaud, because Israel will be entirely out of Lebanon and Hezbollah will lose its justification for attacking Israel.

Sure, it may not be a perfect solution, but it is better than Israel invading Lebanon over and over, let alone a Lebanese civil war. It’s worth a try.