The death of Ofer Bronchtein on Monday 18 May in Paris closes the path of a Franco-Israeli activist who has defended until the end an idea that has become a minority, disputed and still central in international diplomacy: two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in security. He was 69 years old, weakened for several months by respiratory disease, and left behind the image of a man of passage and bond, able to speak to Israeli, Palestinian and French officials without abandoning what was the constant thread of his public life. His disappearance came as the war hardened opinions, fragmented societies and made the language of coexistence almost inaudible.
Ofer Bronchtein, a life between Israel and France
Born in Beer-Sheva, Negev, in 1957, Ofer Bronchtein belonged to this Israeli generation that experienced the hope of Oslo and its collapse. He had grown up between Israel and France, where his family had settled when he was a child. Returning to Israel as a teenager, he had lived in a kibbutz near Mount Tabor and then in Tel Aviv, in the popular district of Shkhunat Hatikva. This course has counted. He distanced him from an abstract view of the conflict. He has put it in contact with harsh social realities, community fractures and an Arab neighbourhood, often reduced in the Israeli political debate to a threat rather than a people.
His commitment took a decisive form in the 1980s. In 1987, he met Mahmoud Abbas in Spain, despite the prohibition imposed by Israeli law against any contact with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization. He was imprisoned on his return. The episode already sums up man: he was not first looking for consensus, but for contact. He thought that peace could not arise from a complete separation between adversaries. It had to go through the word, even illegal, even unpopular, even dangerous.
Oslo’s legacy, between hope and disillusionment
Ofer Bronchtein then moved closer to the Labour Party and the entourage of Yitzhak Rabin. He lived closely the time of the Oslo accords signed in 1993, when the handshake between Rabin and Yasser Arafat gave the world the image of a possible outcome. He was not the main architect of this process. He was one of the civilian faces, one of those who believed that diplomacy should be based on smugglers, informal interlocutors, human ties capable of resisting aircraft calculations. His loyalty to Oslo was not nostalgic. It was based on a simple conviction: the lack of agreement condemns the two peoples to live under fear, domination, revenge or isolation.
The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 marked a profound break for all Israeli supporters of peace. Bronchtein never really gave up, according to several witnesses of his journey. The second intifada, the expansion of colonization, the Palestinian political fragmentation, the rise of the Israeli right, the wars in Gaza and the massacres of 7 October 2023, then made his fight more isolated. But he didn’t give it up. Where many concluded that dialogue had become impossible, he continued to defend the opposite idea: the more violence progresses, the more mediators become necessary.
A Forum to Maintain Dialogue
In the late 1990s, he settled in France for a long time. This displacement does not mean withdrawal. He turned Paris into an observation, advocacy and contact post. In 2002, he co-founded the International Peace Forum with Palestinian Anis AlQaq. The organisation wants to promote dialogue between Israelis, Palestinians, Europeans and Mediterranean, but also to encourage cultural, economic and social projects. Bronchtein knew that peace declarations were not enough. They must be translated into cooperation, meetings and institutions that can exist when governments close.
His strongest symbol remains the Palestinian passport received in 2011 from Mahmoud Abbas. This document had political and personal value. To an Israeli Jewish activist, he meant to say that Palestinian recognition should not be seen as a denial of Israel. On the contrary, it could become evidence of coexistence. Bronchtein saw it as a gesture that an Israeli could help build a Palestinian state without betraying his own people. This idea won him criticism, sometimes attacks. She also explains why he remained a singular figure.
Two States as a security requirement
The two-state solution was its constant horizon. He did not defend it as a diplomatic formula repeated by habit. He conceived it as a minimal architecture of justice and security. In his vision, Israel should remain the national state of the Jewish people, recognized and protected. Palestinians had to obtain a sovereign, viable and recognized State in order to break out of occupation, dispossession and humiliation. One could not be sustainable without the other. Israeli security without Palestinian freedom became dominant. Palestinian freedom without guarantees for Israel became unstable. It was this joint that he stopped defending.
This position often placed him in an uncomfortable in-between. Part of the Israeli right saw him as a naïve, even a man too close to the Palestinians. Part of the pro-Palestinian militants considered his vision too attached to Israel and insufficient in the face of the reality of occupation. In France, he was sometimes irritated by his frankness, his direct style, his refusal to accept administrative prudence. But its usefulness came precisely from this imperfect position. He spoke from a place that the logics of war seek to destroy: the simultaneous recognition of Israeli pain and Palestinian pain.
The recognition of Palestine by France
From 2020, Bronchtein worked with Emmanuel Macron on the Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement. His exact role has sometimes been described as informal, sometimes as a task entrusted by the Presidency. The essential thing is elsewhere: it helped to maintain, in the French entourage, the idea that the recognition of the Palestinian State could once again become a political lever. When France recognized the State of Palestine at the UN on 22 September 2025, this gesture was presented by the Elysée as one of the milestones of the long path of dialogue to which he had dedicated his life.
This recognition does not resolve the conflict. She doesn’t stop the dead. It does not guarantee the end of the occupation, the security of the Israelis, the reconstruction of Gaza or Palestinian political reunification. But it counted for Bronchtein, because it broke with the idea that the Palestinian state should remain a promise indefinitely delayed. He considered that peace required acts of recognition, not just calls for the resumption of negotiations. A negotiation without a clear horizon becomes an empty process. Recognition without negotiation remains incomplete. He sought to meet these two requirements together.
A tribute to a humanist voice
The tribute published by the Elysée insists on this function of smuggler. The French Presidency salutes a man who has dedicated his life to peace and humanism. She recalls her childhood between Israel and France, her engagement in dialogue with the PLO, her closeness to Rabin, her Palestinian passport and her efforts to promote the recognition of Palestine. These elements draw a coherent route. Bronchtein has not changed combat over the decades. He changed terrain, method, interlocutors, but he kept the same direction.
Other tributes emphasized the same tenacity. Anti-racist organizations and community leaders reiterated their commitment to coexistence, even when they did not share all their positions. This shade is important. To pay tribute to Ofer Bronchtein does not mean to erase the disagreements that he aroused. This means recognizing that he has maintained a space of speech that war seeks to reduce. Israeli, Palestinian and French societies need these spaces, precisely because they are crossed by anger, fear, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, colonial wounds and competing memories.
Still believing in peace
His death comes at a time when peace seems almost out of reach. After 7 October, after the war in Gaza, after the widening of regional divides, the very words of dialogue and compromise often seem suspicious. Israeli families bereaved or worried about hostages can hear peace as an abstraction. Palestinians faced with shelling, displacement, colonization or daily humiliation can hear coexistence as an empty word. Bronchtein knew that. He knew the violence. He only refused to leave him the monopoly of the future.
That’s where his journey keeps a current reach. He recalls that believing in peace is not denying the real. On the contrary, it is to look at the real to the end. The reality today is the impossibility for Israel to obtain lasting security by force alone. It is also impossible for Palestinians to achieve stable freedom without a political, institutional and diplomatic framework. Finally, it is impossible for the region to emerge from the repetition of wars if each generation inherits only the dead, walls and reprisals. Peace is not a reward for calm times. It becomes necessary when everything pushes to consider it impossible.
Ofer Bronchtein was not a prophet. It did not prevent Oslo’s failure. He did not prevent colonization. It did not prevent Hamas, wars, attacks, bombings, hatreds imported into Europe or the abandonment of leaders. His life is not measured by a clear political victory. It is measured by continuity. For four decades, he maintained the same line: one people does not disappear because the other is afraid; Crash-based security produces further violence; a just cause deteriorates when it ceases to recognize the humanity of the other.
This lesson also applies to France. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict divides neighbourhoods, political families, communities and sometimes friendships. Bronchtein refused to import hatred mechanically. He believed that European societies had a particular responsibility: to protect Jews from anti-Semitism, to protect Muslims from amalgam, to defend Palestinians against erasure, to defend Israelis against dehumanization. This position requires consistency. She exposes to trials of treason or treason. However, it remains essential to prevent the conflict from becoming an internal language of separation.
The most fair tribute therefore consists in not turning Ofer Bronchtein into a harmless icon. He was an activist, not just a beautiful conscience. He took sides for the recognition of Palestine. He took sides for Israel’s security. He took sides for dialogue with those whom his own camp sometimes refused to meet. He took sides against the idea that history would be written in advance by extremists. His disappearance forces us to look at what becomes of a world without smugglers. He becomes faster, more brutal, safer from his slogans, but less able to save lives.
We must still believe in peace, not because it would be close, but because its abandonment would leave the ground for war entrepreneurs. To believe in peace does not mean to forget crimes. This means looking for political conditions so that they do not repeat themselves. This means defending a real Palestinian State, capable of governing, protecting its citizens and recognizing Israel. This means defending a secure Israel, but also accountable to the right and freed from the temptation to control indefinitely another people. This means accepting that one’s justice cannot be built on the other’s erasure.
This legacy is fragile, but it is concrete. It holds in a method more than in a certainty. Bronchtein was looking for interlocutors before looking for stands. He believed in symbolic gestures, but only when they opened a practical path. He knew that flags, passports and speeches did not replace institutions, secure borders, international guarantees and rebuilt trust. His journey recalls that peace requires obstinate mediators, capable of supporting the incomprehension of their own and the distrust of others.
Ofer Bronchtein did not see the sovereign Palestinian state to which he devoted much of his life. Nor will he see Israeli-Palestinian peace once again become a majority horizon. However, he saw France take the step of recognition, after years of advocacy. He has left networks, texts, memories, disagreements and a simple injunction: to continue to speak when everything pushes to silence. His death leaves a void in this fragile diplomatic and human corridor where those who think that peace is not a naivety, but the only serious way out of the catastrophe still intersect.
