Tom Wegner and the Abrahamic Movement

Tom Wegner (תום וגנר) is an Israeli strategist, author and self-described “peace entrepreneur” who founded the Abrahamic Movement — sometimes called the Global Abrahamic Movement — to build a shared regional identity among Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, Alawites and other minorities by emphasizing their common spiritual descent from Abraham. The project calls this “political Abrahamism”: an umbrella identity that leaves distinct religious and cultural practices intact while deliberately lowering intergroup hostility, according to a Jerusalem Post feature on the movement.

Wegner was raised in left-leaning Israeli political circles — Peace Now Youth, Meretz Youth — and served in the IDF’s District Coordination and Liaison unit around Jericho in the late 1990s, coordinating between Israeli forces and Palestinian Authority police. He later worked as a spokesperson for former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and in peace-building roles at the Peres Center for Peace and the World Bank, before turning to interfaith diplomacy. His book The Abrahamic Revolution: A Middle Eastern Peace Formula — published in Hebrew, English, Arabic, Dutch, Indonesian and other languages — argues certain Quranic verses (Surah Al-Ma’idah 5:21, Surah Al-Isra 17:104, Surah Yunus 10:93) support Jewish ties to the land, a claim Wegner has framed as evidence of “Zionist” elements within the text itself.

His argument, in short: most Middle Eastern conflict is identity-driven, an in-group/out-group dynamic that drawing borders alone cannot fix. The answer, he says, is widening the in-group — using a shared Abrahamic narrative that Jews, Muslims (religious or secular), Christians, Druze and Alawites already accept at some level. He contrasts this with Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah, which he says offer comprehensive identity, community and services with little mainstream counter-narrative. His answer is what he calls “Abrahamic Islam” — loyal to core Islamic sources, but acknowledging Jewish historical claims and naming extremism as a shared enemy of Jews, Christians, Muslims and minorities alike.

Launched around 2019 and accelerated sharply after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, the movement runs through the platform abrahamic.org, positioning itself as a grassroots, spiritual and civil-society complement to the top-down Abraham Accords. By late 2026 it reported branches or chapters in Israel, Morocco, Iraq, Gaza and Palestinian Authority areas, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Pakistan, Somaliland, Sudan, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Liberia, Canada, the Netherlands, Finland, Czechia, Slovakia and South Africa, among others — with an Interreligious Council launched in August 2026 under inaugural co-chair Rabbi Dr. Yakov Nagen of the Jerusalem Interfaith Center.

“We are pro-Abraham, not simply pro-Israel.”Pakistani and Iraqi chapter members describing their motivation, Jerusalem Post interview

The human cost of that stance is real. Pakistani branch chairman Khurram Ali Raza spent four months in detention after authorities investigated his peace advocacy, and continues the work despite ongoing risk and family pressure. Iraqi Sunni scholar Abu Musa Al-Iraqi argues normalization serves Iraq’s interests even though Iraqi law imposes life imprisonment or death for promoting Zionist ideas or relations with Israel. Hostile coverage from pro-Iranian outlets has branded the movement “infiltration,” and Turkish media reacted sharply to Alawite chapter appointments — a reminder of how contested this terrain remains.

The Cyrus Accords: Repaying a 2,500-Year-Old Debt

If the Abrahamic Movement is Wegner’s pan-regional project, The Cyrus Accords is its Persian-focused companion — co-written with Iranian opposition author Arash Hamedian and published first in Hebrew, with an English edition announced around March 2026. The book leans on the legacy of Cyrus the Great, the Achaemenid king whom the Hebrew Bible calls God’s “anointed” (Isaiah 45) for freeing Jews from Babylonian exile and permitting the rebuilding of the Temple. Iranian tradition, in turn, reveres Cyrus as the father of the nation and a symbol of tolerant rule.

Wegner and Hamedian argue the hostility of the post-1979 era is an aberration imposed by the Islamic Republic, not an inevitable destiny — and they cast Cyrus as “the first Zionist,” proposing a secular, national roadmap for partnership between Israel and a future, democratic Iran. The term “Cyrus Accords” itself was popularized by Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi to describe what ties with a post-regime Iran could look like. The book was formally launched online on March 11, 2026, and its proposals lean heavily on practical, civilian cooperation: Israeli desalination and irrigation expertise for Iran’s water crisis, energy, technology, tourism and education — alongside a vision of expanding the I2U2 grouping (India-Israel-UAE-US) into a broader “I4U2” that could one day include Iran and Iraq.

Framework details per the Jerusalem Post, September 19, 2026.

The Abraham Accords, Six Years On

Wegner’s movement did not invent the idea of Abrahamic kinship as diplomacy — it is building on the Abraham Accords, the U.S.-brokered normalization agreements signed in 2020 between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain and, later, Morocco, with Sudan signing a declaration never fully implemented. Unlike a traditional peace treaty resolving war or territory, the Accords are normalization frameworks: embassies, direct flights, trade, tourism and security cooperation, deliberately built around shared interests rather than a resolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a U.S. State Department strategy report.

Economically, the results have been real but uneven. Israel-UAE cumulative merchandise trade reached roughly $14.5 billion by mid-2026, underpinned by a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement; Morocco has become a major buyer of Israeli defense systems; Bahrain’s trade volumes remain far smaller, even as government-to-government ties held. The Accords survived the stress test of the post-October 7, 2023 wars in Gaza, Lebanon and later Iran — no signatory withdrew — though public-facing cooperation cooled sharply in Bahrain and Morocco amid domestic anger over Gaza casualties.

Critics note the Accords deliberately sidelined the Palestinian issue as a precondition — a design that enabled fast breakthroughs but left the framework politically exposed, and arguably gave Israel more room to deepen West Bank settlement activity without addressing core Palestinian demands. Saudi Arabia, the most consequential prospective member, remains outside the framework. Still, in September 2026, Israel, Morocco and the U.S. held a trilateral summit in New York agreeing to upgrade missions to full embassies and expand flight links — a sign, officials say, that the post-war phase is now about deepening rather than merely surviving.

Trade figures per the Heritage Foundation Abraham Accords Report, Q1 2026.

The Negev Forum’s Six Working Groups

If the Abraham Accords supplied the handshake, the Negev Forum — born at the March 2022 Negev Summit in Sde Boker, bringing together Israel, the U.S., the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Egypt — was meant to supply the follow-through. A framework adopted in November 2022 built the Forum around an annual Foreign Ministers’ Ministerial, a rotating presidency, a Steering Committee, and six sector-specific working groups.

The largest working-group session — roughly 150 officials — met in Abu Dhabi in January 2023, the biggest Israeli-Arab multilateral gathering of its kind in decades. A second ministerial, planned for Marrakesh, was meant to approve concrete projects and potentially bring in Jordan as a full member and the Palestinian Authority as a session participant. It never happened: the October 7 attacks and the wars that followed canceled the summit, and the Forum went largely dormant. Analysts and former U.S. officials involved in its design continue to call for its revival as a ready-made platform once conditions allow — and its logic, if not yet its activity, is what movements like Wegner’s are trying to keep alive in the meantime.

What Implementation Actually Looks Like, Late September 2026

Put the diplomacy, the economics and the grassroots narrative-building side by side, and a mixed but resilient picture emerges. Full embassies and ambassadors are in place with the UAE and Bahrain; Morocco is mid-upgrade following the September 2026 trilateral summit in New York. Security cooperation has, if anything, deepened faster than public diplomacy: Morocco has become a major buyer of Israeli air-defense and satellite systems, and in 2026, amid regional conflict involving Iran, Israel deployed an Iron Dome battery to help defend the UAE — an unusually visible marker of trust built since 2020.

People-to-people ties tell a more fragile story. Direct flights and tourism boomed after 2020, but wartime imagery and domestic politics have repeatedly cooled visible cooperation in Bahrain and Morocco even as trade and quiet security coordination continued underneath. On September 24, 2026, the first official multilateral meeting of Accords countries since January 2023 convened in New York — hosted by the N7 Foundation and including Kazakhstan for the first time — with the agenda shifting from new normalizations toward practical cooperation.

It is into that gap between quiet official resilience and shaky public sentiment that Wegner’s movement, and chapters like Raza’s in Pakistan, are trying to insert something the treaties never supplied: a story ordinary people might actually believe. Whether “political Abrahamism” can scale beyond volunteers and dedicated activists, or meaningfully shift attitudes rather than just headlines, remains the central open question — one that Wegner, and the region, will keep testing in the months ahead.

Additional reporting drawn from the Jerusalem Post (September 19, 2026), U.S. Department of State strategy documentation, and the Heritage Foundation’s Q1 2026 Abraham Accords Report. Links to primary sources are embedded throughout this article.