There was a time when speaking of peace with Israel was considered treason, and even contemplating it was a luxury deemed inappropriate for an Arab state living at the heart of the conflict. Today, however, the irony is that those who raised the banner of war in the name of Palestine are themselves buried under the rubble of their cities, the ruin of their institutions, and the fragmentation of their societies. The conflict ended without anyone declaring its conclusion. No treaty was signed, no white flag was raised, yet the undeniable truth is that Arabs, as peoples and states, emerged from the war without victory.
Had the French philosopher René Descartes lived in the Arab world today, he would likely have called for doubt in everything we inherited about the Arab Israeli conflict. As the proponent of methodological doubt leading to certainty, he would have told us: do not believe that hostility is destiny, nor that war is identity. Try to think beyond emotion. Cartesian logic does not seek truth in slogans, but in experience. If we apply this method to our reality, we find that the continuation of war has not liberated a single inch of land, and that the absence of peace has protected no one. What we spent on slogans, Israel spent on technology. What we lost on the battlefields, it gained in markets. What we dreamed of liberating, we allowed to slip away amid economic collapse and sectarian massacres.
Doubt here is not a philosophical luxury, but a political necessity. The first certainty we must reach is that the war that failed to change Israel succeeded in changing us. It altered our maps and borders, and turned Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria into heaps of ruin and testing grounds for international power balances. Syria, once described as the beating heart of Arabism, has become a laboratory redefining sovereignty, alliances, and the very concept of the enemy. The war that destroyed it was not with Israel, but a war among its own people. The lines of fire did not open in the Golan, but in Aleppo, Deir ez-Zor, and Homs. Instead of a struggle to liberate land, the conflict became about who would own it after the war.
In this context, thinking about peace with Israel, or a realistic understanding with it, becomes not a concession but a step on the path to national recovery. The Cartesian equation is simple: if the purpose of war is life, and war ends life, then logic demands the search for an alternative that restores it.
Peace, in the Syrian case, is not merely a political settlement, but a rational project for rebuilding the state. Lifting the Caesar Act, for example, or opening economic channels with neighboring countries including Israel, could free the Syrian economy from chronic siege and restore electricity to cities, water to farms, and life to hospitals. Not because Israel is a friend, but because it is a potential gateway within the new network of interests shaping the region.
Syria today needs to doubt its old narratives, its slogans, and its discourse of hostility, in order to begin anew with a cool mind rather than heated emotion. Lebanon, which long placed itself at the center of confrontation, has now become a prisoner of its internal equations. The resistance that granted itself the legitimacy of arms outside the state has exhausted that legitimacy in internal conflicts rather than border battles. Lebanese citizens no longer see Israel as a greater threat than banking collapse or the darkness that envelops Beirut every night.
In the Cartesian method, doubt is the beginning of thinking, not its end. Lebanon, like Syria, must first doubt the assumption that governed it for decades: that the continued presence of Hezbollah’s weapons guarantees sovereignty. Reality and experience say otherwise. There is no sovereignty amid dual power and divided loyalties. Peace with Israel, or at least ending the state of no peace, is not surrender but a restoration of the natural function of the Lebanese state, so that it may once again become an Eastern Mediterranean economic hub rather than a trench in other people’s wars, a reality the world understands today more than Lebanon itself.
From Cairo to Riyadh, and from Abu Dhabi to Manama, Arab states have chosen to shift their battle from the battlefield to the marketplace. Normalization is no longer seen as betrayal, but as an expression of a new political realism that views investment in the future as more important than revenge for the past. This is not mere pragmatism, but pure Cartesianism. Thought begins only when it doubts, and ends only when it finds its proof in interest rather than emotion. Time has changed the definition of the enemy. Israel is no longer the sole danger. Internal collapse, corruption, and intellectual stagnation have become enemies no less destructive. In this sense, peace is not reconciliation with Israel as much as it is reconciliation with the self, and with the ability to think openly after long decades of ideological closure.
Rationality does not absolve anyone. Israel has committed many atrocities, yet it survived because it invested in science, economics, and diplomacy. Arabs, by contrast, invested in the discourse of victimhood until it became their identity. The real test today is not who was right, but who has the courage to redefine what is right according to present realities. When Descartes called for beginning with methodological doubt, he did not mean destruction, but reconstruction on solid foundations. Peace, in this sense, is not defeat, but a new founding moment for the Arab mindset after centuries of backwardness.
Peace with Israel is no longer frightening. There is nothing left on the fronts worth fighting for, and nothing in the slogans that convinces anyone. The certainty we may reach after this long doubt is that living matters more than conflict, building runs deeper than heroics, and the human being is more precious than any cause.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of +963.
