On a stage lit for a slide reading “Repaying a 2,500-Year-Old Debt,” a broad-shouldered man in a dark suit paces with a microphone, building toward a comparison few Western audiences would expect to hear at a political gathering: Cyrus the Great, he tells the room, was “the original Zionist.” It is a provocative line, delivered with the practiced cadence of someone who has spent two decades writing other people’s campaign speeches before deciding to write his own.

The man is Tom Wegner (תום וגנר), an Israeli strategist, author, and self-described peace entrepreneur who has spent the past several years building something he calls the Abrahamic Movement — a global, faith-rooted network that argues the next phase of Middle East normalization will not be won in ministries and summit halls, but in living rooms, WhatsApp groups, and interfaith gatherings from Rabat to Erbil.

From the Jericho checkpoint to the campaign trail

Wegner’s path to this stage began far from public relations. Born in Haifa and raised in the left-leaning political culture of groups like Peace Now Youth, Sadaka-Reut, and Meretz Youth, he served in the late 1990s in an IDF District Coordination and Liaison unit tasked with coordinating between Israeli forces and Palestinian Authority police around Jericho — ground-level exposure, he has said, to the daily mechanics of the conflict long before he ever tried to solve it in a book.

That early experience fed into a long career in political consulting. Wegner served as spokesperson for Knesset member Ilan Gilon, worked communications for Ehud Barak’s 2001 prime ministerial campaign, and became a longtime advisor to Amir Peretz — through Peretz’s tenure at the Histadrut labor federation, his primary victory over Shimon Peres, and his 2006 run for prime minister. He later did stints on Likud primary campaigns, municipal races, and as spokesperson for the Peres Center for Peace during Shimon Peres’s active involvement, alongside strategic communications work for the World Bank, the United Nations, and the European Union.

He also spent a period as spokesperson for the mixed Jewish-Arab municipality of Kafr Qasim — an assignment that, colleagues say, sits closer to the throughline of his later work than his high-profile national campaigns do.

From “Cannabis Wars” to a peace manifesto

Before he was pitching interfaith diplomacy, Wegner was an investigative author. His book Cannabis Wars became a bestseller and won a Global Book Award for its English edition. But the project that reoriented his career was The Abrahamic Revolution — published in Hebrew, Arabic, English, Dutch, Indonesian and other languages — which lays out what he calls “political Abrahamism”: a peace framework built not on treaties alone, but on the shared heritage that Jews, Christians, and Muslims trace back to Abraham, or Ibrahim.

He has since co-authored two further books built on the same premise of unlikely collaboration: Unity of the Believers, written with Palestinian author Elias Nasri Baboun and described as the first Israeli-Palestinian co-written book of its kind on interfaith mediation, and The Cyrus Accords, co-authored with Iranian opposition figure and author Arash Hamedian, which uses the legacy of Cyrus the Great to argue for a future Israeli-Iranian rapprochement.

A tent with branches from Rabat to Ghana

Around 2024, Wegner established the Middle East Center as a platform for direct dialogue and grew it into the wider Abrahamic Movement, run today from abrahamic.org. The organization describes itself less as a single institution than as an “ecosystem” — a network of local branches it says now spans Israel, Morocco, Iraq, Gaza and the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Pakistan, Somaliland, Sudan, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Liberia, Canada, the Netherlands, Finland, Czechia, Slovakia, and South Africa, drawing on Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Druze, Alawite, and other minority leaders.

Its activities read like a hybrid of a think tank and a grassroots congregation: more than 50 reported multilingual dialogues, Jewish-Muslim encounters inside Israel, Zoom summits, a book series called the “Abrahamic Peace Codex,” and WhatsApp, Facebook, and Telegram communities the group says reach thousands of members, alongside organized delegations to Israel. Wegner is a frequent presence on social media, posting under the handle @tomweg on X.

The Abraham Accords worked government to government. What we are building is the layer underneath it — the part that decides whether a peace deal survives contact with public opinion. — Framing Wegner has used to describe the Abrahamic Movement’s relationship to the 2020 Accords

Complementing the Accords, not replacing them

Wegner is careful to frame the movement as an extension of the 2020 Abraham Accords rather than a rival to them. The Accords normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco at the government level; Wegner argues that this kind of top-down diplomacy needs a parallel, bottom-up track of civil-society and interfaith work, particularly in places where governments are not yet ready to move, or where domestic public opinion and extremist narratives make normalization politically dangerous.

The movement’s materials lean heavily on the argument that the Quran itself supports a Jewish connection to the land of Israel, and position “Abrahamic identity” as a moral and civilizational counterweight to political Islam and Muslim Brotherhood-aligned resistance narratives. It presents its network of minority communities — Assyrians, Alawites, Druze, and Christians among them — as evidence that an alternative, moderate regional bloc is possible even amid the post-October 7 diplomatic freeze.

Not everyone reads the project the same way. Some Iraqi and Islamist-leaning outlets have described the Abrahamic Movement as an Israeli normalization or influence operation dressed in the language of faith. Supporters counter that genuine bridge-building has to start somewhere unglamorous — in dialogue circles and small delegations — long before it shows up on a state department’s letterhead.

Whichever reading proves closer to the truth, Wegner’s bet is a simple one: that a peace built only by governments is a peace one election away from unraveling, and that the deeper foundation has to be dug by people who share a claim to Abraham’s tent, arguing that claim out loud, in public, together.