Rabin Assassination Commemorated at BU
Boston University commemorated the 20th anniversary of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination this year with a lecture by Israeli security expert Efraim Inbar and a panel discussion moderated by NPR/WBUR On Point host Tom Ashbrook. Our event – which drew a standing-room only audience at the George Sherman Union Conference Auditorium – featured a personal message from former President Bill Clinton and brief comments from Israeli Consul General to New England Yehuda Yaakov.
In his introductory remarks, Elie Wiesel Center Director and Religion Professor Michael Zank deplored the current violence that has made victims of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. “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,” he said.
But, he added, “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 2-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.”
Director of the Begin-Sadat Strategic Studies Center at Bar-Ilan University and currently Visiting Israel Studies Professor of Political Science at Boston University, Professor Inbar knew and worked closely with Rabin for many years. In his lecture, he described the Israeli Prime Minister as a courageous leader, brilliant strategist, and sober realist, whose overriding goal was Israel’s security.
“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 Arafat could not be implemented.
Inbar offered a dire view of Rabin’s legacy. “The peace process with the Palestinians was a failure,” he said. Today, twenty years later, the now “intractable” ethno-religious struggle with “no solution in sight” is, in his view, a “young conflict” that could last decades – an assertion that moderator Tom Ashbrook called “very disturbing.”
President Bill Clinton, who helped broker the 1995 agreement 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.”
Our four panelists offered a diversity of views on Rabin’s legacy and prospects for Mid-East peace. Professor Andrew Bacevich, Chair Emeritus of BU’s Department of International Relations, 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 Professor Inbar’s bleak predictions, Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, 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 Op-Ed Columnist Jeff Jacoby agreed with Professor 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 power alone is not enough to secure peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Part of the problem, he said, is 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.
The evening concluded with a half hour of questions from the audience, with vigorous discussion continuing long after in the reception that followed.