Élie Barnavi

Élie Barnavi was born in 1946 in Bucharest

Élie Barnavi was born in 1946 in Bucharest, Romania, the only child of Jewish parents from Bessarabia. His father had served as an officer in the Soviet army in World War II and later became a Zionist. In 1961 he moved to Israel and spent a year on a kibbutz in the northern Negev.

His uncle Avraham Bar-Navi, who gave him his Hebrew surname, enrolled him at the Collège des Frères Saint-Joseph boarding school in Jaffa. There he came to know French culture. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Tel Aviv University, and earned a doctorate in history at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1971.

He served in the Paratroopers Brigade and fought in the Six-Day War. As a reservist he took part in the Yom Kippur War and the 1982 Lebanon War, which he criticized.

He taught modern history at Tel Aviv University, specializing in France in the 16th and 17th centuries. In 1998 he became head of the scientific committee of the Museum of Europe in Brussels. From 2000 to 2002 he was Israel's ambassador to France, and then returned to teaching.

He was active in Peace Now and supported a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In 2010 he helped found JCall. His book on murderous religions appeared in France in 2006.