How Israel Lost Its Way and How Trump Can Save Lebanon

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Thomas L. Friedman

How Israel Lost Its Way and How Trump Can Save Lebanon

April 21, 2026,

5:00 p.m. ET

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Shir Torem/Reuters

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By

Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

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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 A.I.-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 I.D.F. soldier had indeed taken a hammer to the face of a statue depicting Jesus.” He added, “There was no A.I., 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 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 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 Gaza, 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.

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