Shafaq News / Some U.S. circles celebrated the call of 300 Iraqi personalities to join the Abraham Accords, normalize relations with Israel, and lift the ban on communication between Iraqis and Israelis at a conference in Erbil last Friday.

The call for normalization with Israel emerged from the Erbil conference organized by the Center for Peace Communication (C.P.C.), a New York City-based non-profit think-tank that, according to its website, seeks to promote relations between the Israelis and the Arab world.

Joseph Brody, the head of the Center and a former fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote in 2019 an opinion titled the "Reform: A Cultural Policy of the Arab-Israeli Partnership" on how to protect Arab peacemakers from punishment for engaging in communication with Israeli people.

Among the Center's board members is Ambassador Dennis Ross, a former U.S. official who has served in the U.S. negotiating teams in the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations over recent decades. He currently works at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and is known for his pro-Israeli stances. It also includes Adam Garflink, a neoconservative theorist and a founding member of the American Interest magazine.

The conference called on the Iraqi government to join the Abraham Accords, signed in mid-September 2020 by the U.A.E., Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. The agreement provides for the recognition of Israel and the establishment of relations with it after decades of boycott under official U.S. auspices.

Democratic President Joe Biden's administration stated that while it opposes most of former President Donald Trump's administration's policies, it agrees and supports the Abraham accords and intends to expand them to more Arab countries.

On the wall street journal's opinion page, Sons of Iraq Awakening (Sahwa) movement, Wissam al-Hardan, explicitly hoped that Iraq joins the roster of the Arab countries that ratified the Abraham Accords, "Full relations with Israel will help atone for the heinous act of expelling our Jewish population."

Some reports indicate that the majority of Iraq's estimated 150,000 Jews left the country after the 1948 war, which broke out after the founding of the State of Israel.

"We have taken the first step of meeting publicly in Erbil with an American organization, the center for Peace Communications," al-Hardan said in his article, "We will seek direct talks with the Israelis, and no foreign or local power has the right to prevent us from moving forward. Iraq's anti-normalization laws, which criminalize civil participation between Arabs and Israelis, are morally abhorrent."

Influential U.S. figures who have worked on the Arab-Israeli peace process over the past years, such as Martin Indyk, Dennis Ross, and others, have retweeted the article.

Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Studies, is leading a campaign to support the Erbil conference in Washington by exerting pressure upon the administration to endorse the normalization demands of some Iraqis.

While Colonel Wayne Marotto, spokesperson for the U.S.-led coalition to defeat ISIS, distanced himself from the Erbil conference on demanding support for normalization with Israel, Satloff called on his country to seize the opportunity and embrace the calls for Iraqi-Israeli normalization.

Global Coalition's spokesperson tweeted that he was not aware of the event - the Erbil meeting - nor did he have any knowledge of the participants.

Those tweets were the first public comment by a U.S. official about last Friday's meeting. It appears to be an attempt to soothe the infuriated Iraqi government, which quickly dismissed the Erbil conference as an illegal act that does not represent Baghdad's views on the issue. At the same time, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has remained silent so far.

Satloff responded to Washington's position tweet with a tweet that said, "Respectfully, the question, Colonel, is not whether the Global Coalition had prior knowledge of the Erbil Conference – it is whether, on a policy level, the U.S. government supports the right of brave Iraqis to gather in support of the U.S. goal of broadening the Abraham Accords and peace with Israel."

Satloff then called on the White House and the U.S. State Department to support the Erbil conference, "everyone in that Erbil Conference room was willing to take a risk for the chance of peace and the benefits it would bring Iraq. The U.S. government's role is critical – admin's endorsement will provide a key measure of protection. Hoping to hear from the White House and the State Department soon."

Richard Goldberg, a former White House official and current expert at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (F.D.D.), pilloried the U.S. government's silence and responded by the Coalition spokesperson by "Shame!."

Republican Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee said, "As Iraqi Shiite and Sunni leaders have called for joining the Abraham Accords, we have not yet realized the full potential of the regional peace that President Trump first launched in the historic normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states in 2020."

A prominent Iraqi politician close to the U.S. administration, former MP Mithal al-Alusi, said that Iraq's normalization of relations with Israel is "welcome" by senior Iraqi government and political figures, "The majority of the Iraqi government and political figures, who voice condemnation to normalizing Iraq's ties with Israel, are willing to do so, and some even have relations with many Jewish figures in Europe and hold closed meetings with them outside Iraq."

"Iraq is approaching normalization with Israel, especially since this has the support of a large Iraqi people, many countries, as well as senior Iraqi government figures," al-Alusi said, "these figures have secret relations with Israeli personalities. However, they are afraid to reveal them at the moment."

"The conference was held by Iraqi Sunni and Shiite figures, and Kurds have nothing to do with it," al-Alusi continued, "This conference comes as the culmination of many regional meetings that reject war and militias and call for an independent civil Iraqi state far from the Iranian hegemony."