Trump’s unfiltered commentary on Lebanon is leaving Israel with an impossible choice

For more than two years now, Israel’s growing number of critics abroad have condemned it for what they allege is a reckless and indiscriminate war — with some charging genocide — that has seen tens of thousands killed in Gaza as well as expanding to Lebanon and several other fronts.

At the same time, some — mostly within Israel, particularly on the right — have leveled the opposite critique: Israel has been too timid, too deliberate when fighting terror groups sworn to its destruction. It needs to just finish the job.

On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump managed to make both of those arguments simultaneously.

“Israel is fighting Hezbollah too long, and too many people are being killed,” Trump said at the G7 conference of global leaders in France. “And you don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody. Because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses. And they’re not all Hezbollah, that I can tell you.”

Then, minutes later: “I’m not happy with the way Israel has handled themselves with Lebanon and with Hezbollah. They should have been able to do the job faster. It just goes on forever.”

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Trump followed that up with another somewhat ambiguous statement about Israel and Lebanon on Wednesday, saying he did not want Israel’s fight against Hezbollah to end. “I want Israel to be able to protect themself, but I do want them to use good judgment,” he said.

One could imagine Israel’s top military strategists watching Trump from a secure room in Tel Aviv, smacking their foreheads and exclaiming: “Good judgment! Defeat our adversary quickly with minimal civilian casualties! Why didn’t we think of that?”

In fact, the US president did put forward a solution of his own to the Lebanon morass: pulling Israel out of the fight against Hezbollah and subcontracting it to Ahmed al-Sharaa, the Islamist president of Syria.

In typical Trumpian fashion, the idea is so far outside the box as to be intriguing, but unlikely to happen. What is clear from the US president’s latest stream of consciousness, however, is that Israel now finds itself in an impossible spot.

Most Israelis, polls show, recognize the need to disarm Hezbollah, an Iranian terror proxy that amassed an army on the border and has rained missiles on northern Israel throughout much of the past two and a half years. And analysts say the only way to do so is through a combination of military and diplomatic pressure — depleting the terror group on the ground while shoring up the Lebanese government in its stead.

But the signed memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran, which claims to speak for the US’s allies (i.e., Israel), declares an end to fighting in Lebanon, indicating the US no longer supports Israeli military action against Hezbollah. Trump made as much clear in his comments to the G7, describing the Lebanon conflict as a sideshow that should not distract from the talks with Iran.

‘What do we want to happen?’

Soon, Israel may be forced to choose: Either keep up the military pressure and lose Trump’s diplomatic support, or stay on his good side — but only by ending, or scaling back, the conflict that many see as the country’s most urgent fight.

“Trump is not in the business of these prolonged wars, forever wars,” Ksenia Svetlova, executive director of the Regional Organization for Peace, Economics and Security, told The Times of Israel.

“Trump’s goal is no war in Lebanon, and consequently no war with Iran, because Iran ties these two things together,” she added. “But the goal that is important to Israel — and to I think all of the Israelis, who understand that we cannot continue the way it is — this goal is not achieved.”

At present, Israel is proceeding on the diplomatic and military tracks simultaneously. Fighting in Lebanon continued on Wednesday, with one IDF soldier killed and 12 injured. And Israel has held several rounds of direct talks in Washington, DC, with Lebanese officials, which are reportedly close to yielding a deal.

But both Svetlova and Dan Naor, an expert in Middle Eastern studies at Ariel University whose research focuses on Lebanon, did not put much stock in those negotiations, as historic as they have been.

Svetlova called them “discussions for the sake of the discussions.” Naor said that the fact of the direct talks is a symbolic victory over Hezbollah, which staunchly opposes negotiations with Israel, but that they were unlikely to yield significant progress.

“The Lebanese and the Israelis are broadcasting on different frequencies,” Naor told The Times of Israel. “That is, the Lebanese are talking about a nonbelligerency agreement and not a peace agreement. And I don’t know how much that will work. Certainly not now.”

What Naor does suggest is that the military pressure be combined with diplomatic and financial support for Lebanon’s government from the US, the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia in particular.

“If [the US] wants a Lebanese state without Hezbollah, they need Israeli military pressure to continue,” he said. “It has to come jointly. Because by itself, it won’t help, but it could be good if it comes along with collaborative efforts, external and internal.”

It’s unclear, however, how much those Arab states would be willing to play ball with a continued Israeli military offensive. In Svetlova’s read, Trump’s comments at the G7 were channeling the Saudi perspective, which wants to see the Lebanon fighting stop.

“There is pressure that he is feeling from Arab partners of his, specifically Saudi Arabia,” she said. “I think that the data about the high number of casualties, this is coming from the Saudis who are very deeply involved in the attempts to achieve a permanent ceasefire in Lebanon.”

Also unlikely to get involved is Trump’s preferred candidate, Syria. While Syrian forces used to occupy Lebanon, and Hezbollah was a chief ally of the Bashar al-Assad regime that Sharaa’s forces deposed, the Syrian president is focused on rebuilding his country after more than a decade of civil war, along with securing domestic and international legitimacy. He has little reason to insert his military, which is weaker than Israel’s, in what could be a decades-long quagmire, and reports have said that the Syrian, Israeli and Lebanese leaderships are all opposed to this solution.

“I do not see Syria intervening in Lebanon,” Svetlova said. “Not today, not tomorrow, not after one year. It’s just not interested in that… And being a fragile state, and also dealing with tons of domestic issues, security, and so on, there is absolutely no way that Ahmed al-Sharaa is, can, or will be willing ever to do that.”

The best course of action, she said, is for Israel to first get its own house in order. Instead of just continuing to press the offensive, Svetlova said, Israel must come up with a plan to defeat Hezbollah diplomatically as well as militarily, and only then present that to Trump.

“Israel can, first of all, present its own strategy for Lebanon,” she said. “So what do we want to happen? How do we want it to happen? And again, I think that anybody who looks at the Lebanon scene understands that you cannot achieve this goal by military means only.”

And what if Trump tries to dictate terms? At a certain point, Naor said, Jerusalem needs to do what it thinks is best in combating one of its most powerful foes, even at the risk of angering a US president whose good graces may be fading.

“I don’t know if we need to take the American considerations into account,” he said. “There’s a clear Israeli consideration here, and this war can’t stop here. That is, the military pressure on Hezbollah can’t stop here.”

What happens if the US no longer supports that fight?

“I don’t know,” he said. “But to stop here is to go backward and lose much of what we’ve achieved.”