How President Trump can save Lebanon

If you are looking for two pictures that summarise 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 re-established settlement, Sa-Nur, in the northern West Bank. It is one of four isolated Israeli settlements plunked down in the region that lies under the 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 defence minister, Israel Katz, boasted at the ceremony of the government’s expected legalisation 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 at least try 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 normalisation 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.
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 Hezbollah 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.
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.
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 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.