PARIS — Ofer Bronchtein was brought to tears as French President Emmanuel Macron delivered his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September, recognizing a Palestinian state for the first time.
"Honestly, I cried," he told NPR in an interview in his Paris apartment after his return from New York. "I see it happening in front of me and I see the full room of the General Assembly and everyone is applauding."
Bronchtein says his only regret is that the Israeli delegation walked out of the General Assembly. The Israeli and U.S. governments opposed the move. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said world leaders who recognized Palestinian statehood were granting a "tremendous reward" to the Palestinian militant group Hamas after its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, which triggered the war in Gaza.
Bronchtein refutes this, arguing it is no reward for a group that never sought a peaceful coexistence alongside Israel.
"I strongly believe that if there had been a Palestinian state before the 7th of October, if the Palestinians had been sovereign to run their lives as they wanted, the 7th of October [attack in Israel] would not have happened," he says.
For Bronchtein, recognizing a Palestinian state at the U.N. was the culmination of his life's work. The 68-year-old Israeli-French activist has long promoted the recognition of a Palestinian state alongside Israel to help resolve the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In recent years, he has been doing so as an informal adviser to President Macron. Now, as the French continue efforts for a lasting peace in the region, the president's unofficial envoy is pushing for Paris to play a lead role in the process.
Talking peace over whisky in Ramallah
Bronchtein was first introduced to Macron in 2019 by a mutual friend, he says. The next year, he and the French leader formed a bond during a presidential visit to Jerusalem, where Macron gave a speech on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, and Bronchtein was serving as Hebrew interpreter for France's delegation.
On that trip, as Bronchtein tells it, during a late-night whisky they shared in Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Macron said he wanted Bronchtein to work with him on peace in the Middle East.
Macron understands the issues, and empathizes with both Israelis and Palestinians, Bronchtein explains. The president was looking for a way for France and Europe to play a larger role in the peace process.
Bronchtein, president of the nonprofit International Forum for Peace, receives no salary for consulting Macron, he says. He's sitting at his desk covered with books and papers in the cluttered yet cozy Paris apartment he shares with his wife, American photographer Hally Pencer, and their Labrador Leo.
Bronchtein's only condition is a direct line to Macron.
"I whisper in his ear usually after 12 o'clock at night," when the president's more available, Bronchtein says. "My job is to give some ideas, to react to what's happening on the ground. Sometimes he listens to what I have to say, sometimes he doesn't."
A few months after that Middle East trip, Macron gave Bronchtein his first mission: to find ideas that could bring Palestinians and Israelis together. The activist spoke with hundreds of people across both societies, and assembled what he calls a suggestion toolbox. On top: Arab states should normalize relations with Israel, while Israel should recognize a sovereign Palestinian state. And France should lead the way on statehood recognition. "When the time comes," Bronchtein recalls Macron always saying.
Life in and out of Israel and France
Bronchtein has French and Israeli passports, as well as a Palestinian one.
He was born in the Negev desert town of Beersheba, Israel, in 1957. All of his grandparents were born in what was then Ottoman-controlled Palestine.
His paternal grandparents moved to Tunisia, then a French protectorate, where they gained French citizenship. Bronchtein's father, at age 16, left Tunisia for France, and joined the Jewish resistance against the Nazis.
After World War II, his father boarded the Exodus 1947, a ship filled with hundreds of Holocaust survivors sailing from France to start their lives over in Palestine, which was then under British mandate. He went on to fight both the Arabs and the British for Israeli statehood in 1948. Bronchtein calls his father his hero.
Then in 1966, when Bronchtein was 9, the family left Israel for economic reasons and moved to an immigrant suburb of Paris.
Bronchtein returned to Israel in 1975, at age 17. And there he began a lifelong fight for social justice, peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Arabs.
Jailed for meeting a Palestinian official
He worked on building bridges across the divide, even when it was forbidden. In 1987, Bronchtein met in Spain with a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Mahmoud Abbas. (It was nearly two decades before Abbas became president of the Palestinian Authority.) Their encounter in Spain broke Israel's ban on contacts with PLO representatives at the time. Bronchtein served 15 days in Israeli prison.
Things turned around when he became an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin during the negotiations leading to the 1990s Oslo Accords. Signed by Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, the peace agreements outlined plans for a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Bronchtein remembers the hope surrounding that era. "After that it was like a honeymoon," he says. "I was living in Tel Aviv at the time. I would take my car and an hour later I was on the beach in Gaza, having dinner with my friends. I did the same thing in the West Bank. We were going in and out without any problem. Many of the Palestinians I met became dear friends of mine."
He says Palestinians enjoyed some of that freedom too, for a time, but it didn't last.
In 1995, Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist. Israelis who opposed the Oslo Accords came to power. A Palestinian uprising known as the second intifada began in 2000. Bronchtein grew cynical and life became dangerous in Israel, with Palestinian attacks on buses. He and his wife moved to France with their three children.
Renewed hope for peace
Bronchtein says his hope eventually returned, thanks to dear friends on both sides of the conflict, and the desire for peaceful coexistence that those who know him best say is part of his soul.
In 2002, Bronchtein and a Palestinian partner, Anis al-Qaq, created the International Forum for Peace to foster dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians.
"Bronchtein is unique," says John Lyndon, executive director of Alliance for Middle East Peace, a network of organizations promoting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. While Bronchtein's peace forum is not a member of the alliance, Lyndon says the two have partnered together on recent initiatives.
"What's great about Ofer is that he's brought civil society's voice and impatience into what can often be sterile governmental context," he says. "He hasn't lost the fact that he's an activist. I've seen him be the person in the meeting that is maybe upsetting the diplomats by saying the thing they need to hear. He maintains his access and his conversations with Macron, but he also speaks truth to power."
As a gesture for his work, Palestinian Authority President Abbas gave Bronchtein a Palestinian passport in 2011.
But the Israeli-French peace activist has drawn detractors, too. France has Europe's largest Jewish and Muslim communities, and Middle East tensions often play out in the country. Bronchtein says he receives insults from different sides over his activism, and even death threats from extremist Jews in France and Israel. He has refused President Macron's offer of a security detail.
"Pushing the American president in the right direction"
Bronchtein has been a strong critic of Israel's occupation of the West Bank after the Arab-Israeli war in 1967. He believes it goes against Jewish values and dehumanizes Palestinians, which has also fueled Palestinian hatred toward Israelis. And recently, Palestinians in the West Bank have seen an increase in their land confiscated and violence against them by Israeli settlers.
But the level of violence between Israelis and Palestinians in the last two years is something Bronchtein says he never imagined.
"To tell you honestly, I feel ashamed as an Israeli that some people in my name committed this terrible crime," he says of Israel's vast destruction of Gaza. "And lately, when I speak in front of Palestinians or even in the media, I ask for forgiveness. I hope that one day the Palestinians will forgive us for what's happened in Gaza."
He says Palestinians should also ask forgiveness from Israel "for the terrible things Hamas did on Oct. 7."
In the wake of such destruction and loss, Bronchtein thinks there is a real chance to change the status quo. He says "a lot of Israelis would like to make peace." But lasting peace will only be achieved when Palestinians are masters of their own destiny.
He believes Hamas will one day be vanquished, but says: "You cannot kill an ideology through violence. You kill ideology by giving people a chance to hope for a better future."
France's diplomatic move at the U.N. was deeply planned and coordinated for months with Saudi Arabia, and led countries to revive the call for a two-state solution. Israel threatened retaliation for it, and President Trump initially warned it could "encourage continued conflict."
But Bronchtein and other analysts believe France's move helped lay the groundwork for President Trump's plan for peace in Gaza.
Bronchtein says it's time for Israelis and Palestinians to write a new narrative, much like the Europeans did after the destruction of World War II. It should be a project for the future where they are not enemies, but eventually partners, he says. A narrative that respects the history, the identity and the pain of each side.
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