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.”

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........

© The Times of Israel