A century ago, an Arab leader told the Jewish people: Welcome home. History, in the words of one of the book’s authors, tried to erase that moment. Now two writers, one Syrian and one Israeli, are trying to bring it back.

Tom Wegner, an Israeli strategic consultant and peace activist, and Jamal Sabah, President of the Global Abrahamic Movement – Syria, have published Arab Zionism (הציונות הערבית), a jointly written book that revisits one of the least remembered episodes of modern Middle Eastern diplomacy.

The first edition, in Hebrew, is available now as an eBook and an audiobook. English and Arabic editions are in production and are expected to launch soon, Wegner announced.

The moment history nearly forgot

The book’s starting point is the meeting of two men who each led a national movement. In June 1918, Chaim Weizmann, head of the Zionist Commission, travelled to a desert camp near Aqaba to meet Emir Feisal, the leader of the Arab revolt against Ottoman rule. Seven months later, in January 1919, the two signed the Feisal–Weizmann Agreement, a short document of mutual recognition and cooperation.

Wegner’s announcement says the agreement was signed in 1918. The record shows the men met in 1918 and signed in January 1919, and the difference matters little to the book’s argument: that Arab and Jewish national movements once spoke to each other in the language of partnership.

The words did not become policy. Feisal had attached a handwritten condition to the January agreement, tying it to the fulfilment of Arab independence demands, and that condition was never met. In July 1920, French forces defeated the Syrian army at Maysalun and ended Feisal’s short-lived Arab Kingdom of Syria. What followed was a century of conflict, and the 1919 exchanges slipped out of popular memory on both sides.

Three questions at the centre

According to the announcement, the book uses that missed opportunity as a way in to what it calls the Middle East’s most explosive questions. It frames the project around a single provocation: that Zionism and the Arab world may not be sworn enemies at all, but “two halves of a forgotten shared memory.”

A dialogue, not a manifesto

What sets the book apart, according to Wegner, is its form. It is a “raw dialogue” between a Syrian leader and an Israeli author, in which core concepts of religion, land and sovereignty collide with two of the most charged subjects in the region: the Golan Heights and the very definition of Zionism.

That is the wager at the heart of the project. Rather than papering over their differences, Wegner says, the authors take them apart in order to build a shared consciousness.

Wegner closes his announcement with a question aimed at readers on both sides of the divide: after a century of warring narratives, what if the story we have been told has a completely different ending?

Where to find the book