September 20, 2024
On July 18, 2024, the partners at “Educate America” Dr Walid Phares and Gazelle Sharmahd addressed an “Abrahamic Summit” held in Los Angeles to celebrate and elevate the goals of the Abraham Accords signed during the summer 2020 by the United States with Israel, the UAE and Bahrain to normalize relations between them. Later, the Accords included Morocco and Sudan and more countries were ready to join later. Phares, a former adviser to Donald Trump and foreign policy expert in Washington DC, and Sharmahd, a human rights activist and the daughter of a US hostage in Iran, launched an educational platform called “Educate America” to counter disinformation about the Greater Middle East, and in general about foreign policy. The radicalization of campuses, particularly since October 7, has prompted the co-hosts of “War and Freedom Insight Talks” podcast to launch the platform as a private sector initiative to encourage academics, activists and lawmakers to address the crisis in US education after the latter’s failure to educate students and faculty and inform the public about tragic developments around the region and the world.
Phares and Sharmahd were invited to participate and speak at the Abrahamic Summit held in Los Angeles by the director of Empower Women Media Shirin Taber and her deputy Astrid Hajjar. Taber has assembled a number of NGOs across the country and launched the “Abraham Summits” initiative to spread awareness about bringing community groups seeking peace, cooperation and freedom. The first summit was held in Morocco, followed by a summits in Washington DC, New York at the UN, and last in Los Angeles. The next international Abrahamic gathering will take place in Abu Dhabi next year. Taber opened the Los Angeles Summit with comments focusing on the future of the Abrahamic initiative and how NGOs are and will play an important role in reviving the agreements on the cultural and humanitarian levels.
Dr Phares and Ms Sharmahd have participated in an AMCD delegation to the UN in December 2023 where they engaged permanent missions and the secretariat general, focusing on human rights in the region and Peace strategies.
Dr. Walid Phares
As a keynote speaker, Dr. Walid Phares presented a short history of the Abraham accords and its future. Phares said: “In what I call the genesis of the agreements, many forces, actors and leaders played significant roles in the evolution of what became an actual international agreement towards peace and advancement in the Greater Middle East. While the actual signing took place during the Summer of 2020 on the White House lawn and was sponsored by former President Trump, there is a trail of efforts, previous agreements, and courageous acts spanning decades that led several Arab countries and Israel to converge on the formalization of a different type of pact. The Abrahamic summit didn’t just materialize a document for normalization between two additional Arab governments that decided to establish diplomatic relations with the Jewish state out of thin air, but the Abraham Accords were able to materialize a new era in Arab-Israeli history, one of cooperation and alliance, beyond mutual recognition.”
Phares noted: “The Abrahamic path towards a new era had started with the very early initiatives on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict, almost since the UN vote to create two states in 1947. Before the creation of Israel, Arab leaders and Jewish groups in Palestine and in the region had already been in contact to lay the groundwork for coexistence between the two entities. Personalities from TransJordan and Lebanon had met with Jewish community leaders in Palestine and elsewhere. Despite the multiple Arab-Israeli wars, politicians, dissidents, and intellectuals from the region engaged with Israelis. Lebanese spiritual and political figures even issued letters and suggestions to Israeli leaders, and early ties between Israel and the Kurds in Iraq have been developing over decades.
“The formal pre-Abrahamic accords were preceded by the first peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, the famous Camp David Agreement from September 17, 1978, and these lasted for decades. Another peace treaty was signed between the Republic of Lebanon and the state of Israel on May 17, 1983, but was overturned by the Islamic Republic’s allies operating in Lebanon. The next series of peace pacts came after the end of the Cold War, from the Madrid Conference in 1992, the Oslo Agreements, and the Jordan peace deal with the Israelis. All this history was a gradual build-up leading towards the historic 2020 Abraham Accords.
“These historic agreements actually started with a series of meetings between Gulf politicians and Trump campaign officials during the Summer of 2016, where the two sides exchanged ideas for the future. And after the formation of the Trump administration, a Summit in Riyadh in 2017 resulted in the US and 51 Arab and Muslim leaders endorsing the agenda of peace and countering radicalization. For four years, a dialogue was taking place between the US and several Arab countries with the intent to launch the Abraham partnership, leading to those historic agreements during July and September 2020.”
Phares underlined that “it took a shift in mood in several Arab societies to generate government initiatives towards the US and to produce the Abrahamic movement. Therefore, in order to produce further successes in this direction, we need to involve civil society NGOs in the next phase, representing not only Arabs and Israelis, but also Africans, Iranians, Turks, Asians, as well as ethnic and religious minorities from across the region. The history of the making of the Abraham Accords is long, and I project its future will be very long as well. The quest for peace and freedom is embedded in human nature.”
Gazelle Sharmahd
Gazelle Sharmahd, co-president of the Educate America platform and co-host of the podcast “War and Freedom,” addressed the “freedom ripple effects” of the Abraham Accords. Sharmahd, a human rights activist, is the daughter of a German-American national from Iranian descent, Jamshid (Jimmy) Sharmahd, who has been kidnapped by the Islamic Regime in 2020 and taken to Iran where he was jailed, tortured and condemned to death by the regime. Sharmahd said “one of the dividends of the Abraham Accords was to consolidate the Peace movement in the region, which is needed to propagate civil freedoms. And the latter are vital for the growth of cooperation between governments and communities. One country in particular should be brought to the peace camp, and that is Iran. Unfortunately, my mother country was taken over by an oppressive regime known as the “Islamic Regime,” which came to power through a coup in 1979, and has maintained itself through oppression and terrorism. Among the victims of such systematic terror is my father, Jimmy, who is detained at an undisclosed location in Iran and wasn’t released during the hostage exchange in September 2023.”
Ms Sharmahd added that “The Abraham Accords’ aim is propagating peace in the region, but the Islamic Regime is on a rampage of violence and wars, including the Gaza war. The ultimate evidence that the regime may change course is the release of all political prisoners and those foreigners kept in jail inside Iran. This is why the NGOs participating in this Abrahamic coalition would be very helpful in testifying about the terror and oppression inside Iran to the world. Human rights are brutalized by the Islamic Regime and Iranians are in a need of help. We have launched Educate America to bring information to the American public and fight disinformation spread by radicals and jihadists in the Middle East, including on our campuses here in America.”