There was a time when even uttering the word “peace” alongside “Israel” was deemed treasonous, and merely thinking of it was considered an indulgence unbecoming of any Arab state living at the heart of the conflict. Today, the paradox could not be greater: those who once waved the banner of war in the name of Palestine now find themselves buried beneath the rubble of their own cities, their institutions shattered, and their societies fractured. The Arab–Israeli conflict ended without anyone formally declaring its end. No treaty was signed, no white flag raised, yet the truth is undeniable: the Arabs, both nations and peoples, left the war without victory.
Had the French philosopher René Descartes lived in today’s Arab world, he would have urged us to doubt everything we inherited about the “Arab–Israeli conflict.” The author of the method of doubt leading to certainty would have told us: “Do not believe that enmity is destiny, nor that war defines identity. Try thinking beyond emotion.” Cartesian logic seeks truth not in slogans, but in experience. If we apply his method to our reality, we find that perpetual war has liberated not an inch of land, that the state of neither peace nor war has protected anyone, and that what we spent on rhetoric, Israel invested in technology. What we lost on the battlefield, it gained in the marketplace. What we dreamed of liberating, we abandoned to economic collapse and sectarian violence.
Doubt, in this sense, is not a philosophical luxury but a political necessity. The first certainty we must reach is that the war which failed to change Israel has changed us. It redrew our maps and borders, turning Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria into ruins, laboratories for new definitions of sovereignty, alliance, and enmity. Syria, once “the beating heart of Arabism,” has become a testing ground where the very meaning of statehood is being rewritten. Its war was not fought with Israel, but within its own borders. The front lines opened not in the Golan, but in Aleppo, Deir ez-Zor, and Homs. The struggle ceased to be about liberating land and became about who would own it after the destruction.
Read also: After Gaza Ceasefire: What’s Next for Syria–Israel Security Deal?
Within this landscape, to think of peace or even pragmatic understanding , with Israel is not a concession, but a step towards national recovery. The Cartesian equation is simple: if the purpose of war is life, and war destroys life, then logic demands an alternative that restores it. In Syria’s case, peace is not merely a political settlement but a rational project for state reconstruction. The lifting of the Caesar Act sanctions, for instance, or the opening of economic channels with neighbouring countries, including Israel, could release the Syrian economy from its long siege, bringing power back to the cities, water to the fields, and hospitals back to life. Not because Israel is a friend, but because it is a potential gateway in a new web of regional interests.
Syria today needs to question its old narratives, its slogans, its rhetoric of hostility, and begin anew with a cool head rather than a heated heart. Lebanon, too, long accustomed to placing itself at the centre of confrontation, is now imprisoned by its own internal equations. The “resistance” that once claimed legitimacy for its arms outside the state has exhausted that legitimacy in domestic conflicts rather than at the border. Many Lebanese no longer see Israel as the primary threat, but rather the banking collapse or the darkness that covers Beirut every night.
In the Cartesian method, doubt is not the end of thought but its beginning. Lebanon, like Syria, must begin by doubting the long-standing assumption that the survival of Hezbollah’s weapons guarantees sovereignty. Reality suggests the opposite: there can be no sovereignty amid dual authority and divided loyalties. Peace with Israel, or at least an end to the state of perpetual non-peace, is not surrender but the restoration of the Lebanese state’s natural role: to be an economic hub of the eastern Mediterranean rather than a trench in someone else’s war. The world understands this logic today better than the Lebanese themselves.
From Cairo to Riyadh, from Abu Dhabi to Manama, Arab states have shifted their struggle from the battlefield to the marketplace. Normalisation is no longer seen as betrayal, but as an expression of a new political realism; one that values investment in the future over vengeance for the past. This is not mere pragmatism; it is pure Cartesianism. Thought begins with doubt and ends when it finds proof in interest, not emotion. Time has changed the definition of the enemy: Israel is no longer the sole threat. Internal collapse, corruption, and intellectual stagnation have become equally lethal foes. In this sense, peace is not reconciliation with Israel so much as reconciliation with oneself, with the capacity to think openly after decades of ideological rigidity.
Rationality absolves no one. Israel has committed grave atrocities, yet it has survived because it invested in science, economics, and diplomacy. The Arabs, meanwhile, invested in the rhetoric of victimhood until it became an identity. The real test today is not who was right, but who has the courage to redefine “right” according to the realities of the present. When Descartes called for systematic doubt, he did not seek to destroy but to rebuild upon firmer ground. Peace, in that sense, is not defeat, it is the founding moment of a new Arab reason after centuries of decline.
Peace with Israel no longer terrifies, for there are no longer fronts worth fighting for, nor slogans that convince anyone. The only certainty we may reach after this long doubt is that life is more valuable than conflict, construction deeper than heroics, and human dignity more sacred than any cause.
