A single question, translated into Arabic and dressed in a provocative headline, is doing more to move the conversation on Israeli-Arab relations this month than most official statements have managed all year. “Who Stole Abraham From Us?” asks the title of an essay by the writer Mohamed Iken, first carried by the Moroccan outlet Sahara Press before being picked up and republished by the Lebanese-based Arabic news site Anahar News. Its subject is Tom Wegner, an Israeli author, strategist and self-described peace entrepreneur whose book The Abrahamic Revolution: A Middle Eastern Peace Formula is due out in an Arabic edition in Lebanon in the coming weeks.

Wegner reposted the piece himself on X on Wednesday, thanking Iken for what he called the courage and precision of the essay, and noting that it was already circulating widely across the region within hours of publication.

Iken’s essay does not read like a book review. It reads like an indictment of the logic that keeps the Middle East’s three Abrahamic communities locked in mutual suspicion. Extremists, he argues, are not frightened of people who are different from them so much as they are frightened of what happens when those people stop being an abstraction — when “the enemy” acquires a face, a name, a family, and the story that was built to sustain hatred starts to lose its footing.

A book born out of war

To understand why a Moroccan essay about an Israeli author is traveling so fast through Arabic media, it helps to know where the book came from. The Abrahamic Revolution was written in the aftermath of the war that began on 7 October 2023, and it grew out of a series of unusual, largely unpublicized conversations among religious and community leaders across the region who were looking for a language of peace that did not originate in Washington, Oslo or Brussels. Out of those conversations Wegner developed what he calls Political Abrahamism — the idea that a peace framework for the Middle East will only hold if it is built on the region’s own shared inheritance, rather than imported from the outside.

The book went on to win a gold medal at the Global Books Award, and Wegner has since taken it on the road, presenting it to interfaith and civic groups from Washington to Jerusalem. In December 2025, he addressed a delegation of thirteen Muslim leaders from North America, Pakistan and the Gulf, organized jointly by the American Muslim and Multifaith Women’s Empowerment Council and the Ohr Torah Interfaith Center, several of whom later praised the book’s willingness to name coexistence as a religious obligation rather than a political compromise.

Who is Tom Wegner?

Wegner’s route into peace writing runs through the inside of Israeli political life rather than around it. He has worked as a spokesperson for an Israeli prime minister and as a senior media consultant to a defense minister, and during his military service he was assigned to liaison duties with the Palestinian police — an assignment that gave him, by his own account, an unusually close view of how ordinary security cooperation actually functions on the ground, away from the headlines. He later moved into strategic peace-building work with the World Bank and the Peres Center for Peace, and has run more than forty election campaigns as a political consultant.

Today he is the founder of the Middle East Center, also operating under the name the Center for Middle East Normalization, an organization built to connect Israeli civil society with pro-peace and pro-democracy groups elsewhere in the region. It is the institutional home for the Abrahamic Movement, the advocacy project that grew directly out of the book.

Tom Wegner

Founder, Middle East Center & the Abrahamic Movement

Israeli strategist, author and former government spokesperson. Founder of Political Abrahamism, a peace framework built on the region’s shared religious inheritance rather than on outside mediation.

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  The Abrahamic Revolution: A Middle Eastern Peace Formula Winner, Global Books Award (gold medal). Arabic edition forthcoming from Lebanon, translated with contributions from Mohamed Iken, Sheikh Wazir Saeed Amun and Arnon Gross.
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  The Cyrus Accords Co-authored with Iranian writer Arash Hamedian; sets out a proposed roadmap for an Israeli-Iranian alliance, drawing on the historical legacy of Cyrus the Great.

Political Abrahamism Peace Formula Middle East Center

The argument at the center of the storm

What seems to have struck a nerve in Iken’s essay — and in Wegner’s book more broadly — is a refusal to let either side of the conflict claim a monopoly on suffering. The essay is explicit that the pain of Palestinian civilians cannot be pushed to the margins of any honest reckoning with the region’s future, and just as explicit that this pain cannot be used to turn Jews, as a people, into a stand-in enemy. The reverse holds too: Israeli fear cannot be allowed to justify stripping Palestinians of their rights or their humanity. Iken’s phrase for the alternative is blunt — treating the killing of innocents as wrong only when the victims are “one of our own” isn’t morality, he writes, it is tribalism wearing morality’s clothes.

Wegner’s own framing, echoed throughout the essay, rests on a distinction between memory and vengeance. Communities are entitled to remember what was done to them; they are not entitled to let that memory calcify into an inheritance of hatred passed to children who, as the essay puts it, grow up knowing exactly whom to hate without ever being told why. Justice, in this reading, has to be real — but it cannot be revenge wearing a nicer word.

Iken uses Morocco itself as evidence that the alternative is not naive. Moroccan Jewish life — its markets, its liturgy, its cuisine, its place in the country’s cities for well over a thousand years — is not, he argues, a foreign chapter that can be edited out of Moroccan history without falsifying it. Recovering that memory, he writes, is not a betrayal of Morocco’s Islamic identity; it is an acknowledgment that the country’s identity was always layered.

A test for the reader, not just the writer

Perhaps the sharpest line in Iken’s essay is not about Wegner at all — it is about the Arabic-speaking reader who is about to hold his book for the first time. Can a reader in Rabat, Beirut or Amman open a book by an Israeli author without judging it before the first page? Can they disagree with him without resorting to insults? Iken frames the Arabic translation itself as a kind of test: not of Wegner’s ideas, but of whether tribal instinct can be set aside long enough for an argument to be heard on its merits. If the answer turns out to be no, he writes, the failure will not belong to the book.

It is a test Wegner clearly believes is winnable. In interviews since the book’s release — including a recent appearance on The Capitol Show and on the BICOM podcast — he has described the emergence of Political Abrahamism as something forged in a moment of maximum despair, arguing that the war’s brutality is precisely what pushed a small, unlikely circle of regional leaders to talk to each other differently. Whether that conversation scales beyond a book tour and a viral essay is, inevitably, the open question the region will spend the coming months answering.

For now, the essay’s circulation says something on its own: an Israeli author’s peace argument, translated into Arabic and carried by a Moroccan and then a Lebanese outlet, has managed to travel further and faster than most diplomatic communiqués issued this year.