____________________________________________ 6 IICC Perspectives Continuing and intensifying the same management of the conflict also paves the way for another intifada in the West Bank. No international actor, no country or organization, will volunteer to pull Israel's chestnuts out of the Gazan fire, and Israel will be forced to face its fate alone in the objective circumstances where the Iranian-led "resistance axis" becomes stronger and tension increases in the Palestinian arena. Israel may have to bow to the condition that the military aid it receives depends on preserving human rights and providing humanitarian assistance, with everything that implies. Biden's executive order from February 2024 set a precedent, and the distance from there to its adoption by European countries is short. If the conflict worsens it is liable to collapse the United States' greatest achievement in the Middle East, peace agreements, stable so far, with Egypt and Jordan, and the normalization of relations between Israel and Arab states. The impotence of military supremacy The consequences are piling up and are already evident, and lead to basic questions about the strategic implications of relying solely on military and technological supremacy in dealing with the Palestinian issue. The connection between achievements on the battlefield and translating them into strategy has been exposed as particularly problematic, and echoes what Hegel said about the "impotence of victory” because of its inability to turn victory into viable strategic assets. Israel's "escalation dominance," the result of its military and technological superiority, has not been translated into strategic achievements in the asymmetric confrontation of war in a heavily populated environment, reminding, for instance, of the precedence's of United States' failures in Vietnam and Iraq, and those of Russia in Afghanistan. The striking gap between the military effort on the ground and its strategic consequences and implications may, if the effort continues, severely damage the Israeli public's faith in the government and the IDF, and reinforce its doubts regarding Israel's survival. Continuing the existing management of the confrontation will have only one result: Israel will continue to fill the governance void in the Gaza Strip, giving credence to Israel's worst nightmare, that is, Hamas will survive, weakened but able to regroup and rehabilitate itself, while the Israeli hostages may not survive. On the other hand, a permanent ceasefire and ending the war with a prisoner exchange deal could be leveraged into a political context which would restore a reorganized Palestinian Authority to the Gaza Strip and promote a political arrangement of a division supported by a Sunni Arab-Muslim consensus, while pushing Shi'ite Iran and its proxies to the sidelines of the Arab-Muslim world. That would turn stopping the war, as demanded by Hamas, into a two-edged sword which would strike Hamas itself and balance its achievement of a prisoner exchange deal.
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