In October 2015, BU commemorated the 20th anniversary of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination with a lecture by Israeli security expert Efraim Inbar. Rabin, a two-time prime minister of Israel, was killed in November 1995 by an Orthodox Jew opposed to the Oslo Accords, a series of peace agreements struck in the 1990s between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Lecture, endowed by Jonathan Krivine (CAS’72), featured a keynote by Inbar and a personal video message from President Bill Clinton—who oversaw the signing of the accords.

“We will never know whether this and earlier rounds of violence could have been avoided had the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO been implemented,” said Professor Michael Zank, director of BU’s Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, in his introductory remarks. “It is time to reconsider Rabin, who was not a perfect man, and Oslo, which was not a perfect agreement, but a step in the direction of a two-state solution and a diplomatic, mutually agreed, negotiated settlement of this conflict between the people of Palestine and the Jewish state, whose right to exist is beyond dispute.”

Inbar worked closely with Rabin for many years. In his keynote lecture, he described the late Israeli prime minister as a courageous leader, brilliant strategist, and sober realist, whose overriding goal was Israel’s security. Inbar is director of the Begin-Sadat Strategic Studies Center at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and a fellow at BU’s International History Institute.

“He did not seek peace as a value,” Inbar said. “But he was willing to trade territory for Israel’s security,” premised on the hope that the Palestinian leadership would put an end to attacks on Israel. He became ambivalent after the signing however, according to Inbar, amid continuing reports that the Palestinians were violating the agreement and “were not preparing for peace, but for war.”

“He believed that Oslo was reversible,” said Inbar, who thinks that those violations would eventually have led Rabin to decide that the peace agreement with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat could not be implemented. “The peace process with the Palestinians was a failure,” he added. Today, the now seemingly intractable ethno-religious struggle is, in his view, a “young conflict” that could last decades.

President Bill Clinton, who served as a broker between Rabin and Arafat, struck a very different note. He described Rabin as “a man of uncommon courage and unbounded wisdom” who worked to “build lasting relationships based on mutual understanding” to create “the conditions for peace.”

During a panel discussion that followed Inbar’s lecture, participants offered a diversity of views on Rabin’s legacy and prospects for peace in the Middle East. Professor Emeritus of International Relations & History Andrew Bacevich faulted both sides for the conflict. He said Israel’s continuation of West Bank settlements has “complicated the problem” and threatens to drive a wedge between Israel and the United States because it is “one of the root causes of anti-Israeli sentiment.”

Rejecting Inbar’s bleak predictions, Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, called despair an unacceptable response. She urged a more humane approach, arguing that political leaders alone cannot build peace. “We cannot keep repeating the same canards about Palestinians. Instead, we need to speak to one another,” she added, “because there is no security without peace.”

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby agreed with Inbar’s analysis, asserting that “Rabin would have pulled the plug on Oslo” within a few months of signing the agreement with Arafat. “Israel wasn’t created for peace,” he added. “It was created to have a secure Jewish homeland, even if security means living without peace.”

Professor David Ellenson, director of Brandeis University’s Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, argued that Israel has shifted away from Rabin’s pragmatic focus, “so what had been largely a secular conflict has become more of a religious conflict, and is now much more difficult to unravel.” Overcoming the conflict will require “an ethic of aspiration,” he said, one that acknowledges the conflicting narratives of Israelis and Palestinians, with each believing in their historical right to their ancestral homeland.