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When French President Emmanuel Macron recognized a Palestinian state at the United Nations in September, he revived the discussion of a two-state solution in the West. It was also the result of a lifetime's worth of work by one Israeli French peace activist. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley has the story behind this historic move.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT EMMANUEL MACRON: (Speaking French).
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: It was a moment 68-year-old peace activist Ofer Bronchtein had been working for his whole life.
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MACRON: (Speaking French).
OFER BRONCHTEIN: To tell you, honestly, I cried because it's something that I believed in for many, many years, and I see it happening.
BEARDSLEY: He only regrets the Israelis walked out and didn't hear Macron's message.
BRONCHTEIN: The only way for Israel to be secure and for the Palestinian to achieve their goal of freedom, it's to have sovereignty.
(Speaking French).
(LAUGHTER)
BEARDSLEY: I meet Bronchtein at the cozy, cluttered Paris apartment he shares with his American wife, and aging golden labrador. The longtime activist was first introduced to Macron in 2019 by a mutual friend. The next year, during a presidential visit to Israel where Bronchtein was serving as the French delegation's Hebrew interpreter, the two men formed a bond. Macron noticed Bronchtein's ease and proximity with Palestinians. The Israelis soon became Macron's unofficial peace adviser for the Middle East. Bronchtein does not receive a salary. His only condition is a direct line to the president.
BRONCHTEIN: I whisper it in his ear usually after 12 o'clock at night because I know that at night he's more available.
BEARDSLEY: The first mission Macron gave Bronchtein was to find ideas that could bring Palestinians and Israelis together. So he assembled a sort of toolbox of suggestions. On top, Arab states should normalize relations with Israel, and Israel must recognize Palestinian sovereignty. The activist pressed for France to lead the way. When the time comes, Macron always told him. It finally did with Hamas' horrific attack on Israel and Israel's devastation of Gaza.
BRONCHTEIN: I strongly believe that if it was a Palestinian state before the 7 of October, if the Palestinians were suffering to run their life as they want, the 7 of October would have not happened.
BEARDSLEY: Bronchtein was born in Israel a few years after the Jewish state's founding to a French Tunisian father who arrived in British Mandate Palestine, on a ship of Holocaust survivors after World War II. His father went on to fight for Israel's independence in 1948. Bronchtein calls him his hero.
BRONCHTEIN: I miss him a lot, my father. For me, he was a guide - so humble.
BEARDSLEY: Bronchtein became an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin during the negotiations leading to the 1993 Oslo Accords signed by Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The agreement outlined two states side by side. Bronchtein remembers the hope.
BRONCHTEIN: It was like an honeymoon. We were sure that it's happening. I was living in Tel Aviv at the time. I was taking my car, and an hour after I was on the beach in Gaza having dinner with my friends. We were going in and out without any problems. Many of the Palestinians that I met become dear friend of mine.
BEARDSLEY: Then in 1995, Rabin was assassinated. A few years later, the second intifada began. Bronchtein says he became cynical. But his hope returned, he says, thanks to dear friends on both sides. Bronchtein shrugs off the death threats he's gotten for his work with Macron.
JOHN LYNDON: What's great about Ofer is that he hasn't lost the fact that he's an activist.
BEARDSLEY: That's John Lyndon, executive director of the Middle East Peace Alliance, a network of Israeli and Palestinian peace-building NGOs. Lyndon says it's unusual for somebody who's been at this for so long not to become jaded.
LYNDON: He's brought civil society's voice and impatience. 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 still maintains his access and his conversations and Macron at midnight, but he speaks truth to power.
BEARDSLEY: Bronchtein says the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian West Bank after the 1967 war has been a terrible thing and runs counter to Jewish humanist values.
BRONCHTEIN: We occupied 6 million people, and to be able to justify the occupation, we had to dehumanize them. So the Arab is sick, and the Arab is dirty, and this culture is not a culture. And when you have a bad person in front of you, it's OK to kill her. It's OK to put them in jail without trial.
BEARDSLEY: He says Palestinians have done the same thing, painting all Jews as settlers or soldiers.
BRONCHTEIN: So it's normal to kill them back.
BEARDSLEY: But the level of violence in the last two years is something Bronchtein never imagined.
BRONCHTEIN: To tell you, honestly, I feel ashamed as an Israeli that some people on my name committed this terrible crime. I hope that one day, the Palestinian will forgive us for what's happened in Gaza. They will have to decide themselves if they want to ask for forgiveness to the Israeli for the terrible things that Hamas did on the 7 of October.
BEARDSLEY: The crisis is so deep this time that Bronchtein believes there is a real chance to change the status quo.
BRONCHTEIN: A lot of Israeli would like to make peace with their friends and peace you make with enemies. So it's always difficult, and the compromises are always painful.
BEARDSLEY: He believes Hamas will be defeated but says you can't kill an ideology with violence.
BRONCHTEIN: You have to kill ideology by giving people a chance to hope for a better future. You have more than 25,000 orphan in Gaza today. If we won't give him a chance to hope that life can be better, he will become terrorist.
BEARDSLEY: France became the punching bag for recognizing a Palestinian state, says Bronchtein. But the deeply prepared French-Saudi initiative laid the groundwork for President Trump's Mideast ceasefire plan.
BRONCHTEIN: All of that President Trump understood and he saw. So I'm very happy that we played a positive role in pushing the president of the United States in the right direction.
BEARDSLEY: It's time for Israelis and Palestinians to write a new narrative, he says, much like the Europeans did after the destruction of World War II. A project for the future where they are not just enemies, one that respects the history, the identity and the pain of the other side.
Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris.
(SOUNDBITE OF AEREA'S "AMORE DULCE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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