Maybe fed up with the overwhelming grip of the pro-Israel neo-conservatives dominating the French Foreign Ministry, aka Quai d’Orsay, in 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron, for whatever reasons, installed Franco-Israeli peace activist Ofer Bronchtein as task officer for the rapprochement between Israelis and Palestinians.
According to the French weekly l’Express, Bronchtein fits the label of “maverick” used to designate “strong heads operating out of the system.” Eternal militant for peace, former advisor of Yithzak Rabin during the 1993 Oslo agreements, and President of the International Forum for Peace, which he co-founded with a Palestinian, Bronchtein holds passports from France, Israel and Palestine. His “out of the box” thinking and his personal relations with many people from both the Palestinian and Israeli political and civil society, make him a key back-channel in the current situation.
Bronchtein works for Palestinian-Israeli reconciliation. He sees the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state as the absolute precondition to guarantee security for Israel. Of course, opening up Gaza for immediate humanitarian aid is an emergency. According to the Jerusalem Post, Bronchtein, one week after Macron announced his intention to recognize a Palestinian state, declared that France is prepared to send troops to Gaza to manage the distribution of humanitarian aid. “Quote me on behalf of the French President: If humanitarian aid does not enter because of Israeli fears of Hamas taking over, France is ready to deploy its army and French organizations, and possibly other European countries, to assist with the problem and distribute the aid ourselves,” Bronchtein stated.
Bronchtein has also called for a major U.S.-based peace conference co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia—explicitly countering proposals for population transfers or regional partition. In a recent video, he expressed shame over Israel’s hard-right “fascist” politics and voiced hope that “Palestinians could one day forgive him and other Israelis for the decisions of Netanyahu’s government.”
