As part of a panel of experts from multiple backgrounds and universities, Rabbi David Ellenson — the director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies — participated in a debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at Boston University on Wednesday. The debate was one part of an event titled “Yitzhak Rabin & the Legacy of Oslo: Prospects for Mid-East Peace Twenty Years After the Assassination.”

The debate was moderated by Tom Ashbrook, host of the nationally-broadcast National Public Radio talk show “On Point,” and featured three other panelists. They were Andrew Bacevich, a professor and the Chair Emeritus of BU’s International Relations department; Susannah Heschel, the Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College; and Jeff Jacoby, a conservative op-ed columnist for the Boston Globe. Additionally, Former President Bill Clinton sent a video address to the event’s attendees, giving his perspectives on Rabin. A lecture on Rabin’s history and political attitude was delivered by Efraim Inbar, the director of Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and a current visiting professor at BU.

Rabin was the fifth prime minister of Israel. He signed several historic agreements with the Palestinian leadership as part of the Oslo Accords, which eventually led to his winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, alongside Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. He was assassinated in 1995.

The first speaker of the evening was the Consul General of Israel to New England, Yehuda Yaakov. Noting that this year marked the 20th anniversary of Rabin’s assassination, Yaakov said that “each of us look to his legacy and find something different, and essentially create in our minds what we think his legacy should be.”

To Yaakov, Rabin’s legacy “was represented by a combination of our need to strive for peace with our neighbors while remaining strong. Rabin was on the one hand for coexistence, not only coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians but coexistence within Israel as well … but Yitzhak Rabin was also about our historical affinity to the land.”

Inbar then began his lecture on Rabin’s history and legacy. Inbar had fought as a soldier in Israel’s Six Day War in 1967, and he said that he admired Rabin’s work as Commander-in-Chief during the war. Inbar argued that Rabin “believed that [the] transition to peace is a long historic process, … [and] military superiority is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for making peace.” According to Inbar, Rabin coined the term “dormant war” to describe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and “he understood that peace treaties are a piece of paper, and circumstances can change. The deal with the Palestinians was not territory for peace. The deal with the Palestinians was territory for security.”

Finally, Inbar proposed that the main lessons to consider on the anniversary of Rabin’s death are that “there cannot be peace with the Palestinians in the near future,” and “there is no chance whatsoever of a two-state solution, which I would love to have.” He argued that the gap between the Zionist movement and Palestinian national movement was too large; that the Palestinians “display, not surprisingly, an inability to build a state;” that it is unclear whether Palestinians truly want a state as it would require “giving up the victimhood ethos;” and that peace was impossible due to both sides still having “the energies to fight.” He closed by saying that, compared to other historic ethno-religious conflicts, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still “a young conflict,” and that the main positive outcome of Oslo was that Israelis “are convinced with very few exceptions that it [the failed peace process] was not our fault. We tried. We were rejected.”

At this point, Clinton’s video was shown to the audience through a projector. Clinton said in the video that Rabin “understood that no matter where we live, our security depends not just on the strength of our defenses, but on our relationships with our neighbors. … I am absolutely convinced that had he lived, we would have seen the peace he so deeply desired.”

Ellenson, Ashbrook and the other debaters then took the stage. Ellenson responded to Inbar’s lecture by expressing that he shared many of his feelings, sensibilities and concerns for Israel’s security, but also that he felt Inbar’s view was pessimistic, and the need to find solutions to the problems Israel faces is too great to give in to pessimism. He also praised Rabin’s pragmatism for being willing to shake Arafat’s hand and criticized the use of force by both Israelis and Palestinians, saying “power alone is not going to resolve the issue, we only can solve the issue by some kind of political solution as well.”

Ellenson asserted that a key difference between Rabin and current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is that Netanyahu views the conflict with the Palestinians through a more ideological lens, due to his father’s scholarship about the Jews having constant enemies seeking their destruction — a view that Ellenson said he does not feel is paranoid.

Additionally, Ellenson specifically questioned Netanyahu’s policies which “provocatively affirm” the Jewish people’s right to the Temple Mount. He called on Netanyahu to be more pragmatic in his approach to the issue. Ellenson did state that he believes Jews have a right to the Temple Mount. Finally, he stated his regret that ethnic-religious conflicts can last for centuries historically.

In Bacevich’s comments, he said that he agrees with Inbar’s assessment that there is now no chance of a two-state solution, but that he also felt Inbar was incorrect to hold the Palestinians principally responsible, pointing out that Inbar had not addressed the settlements issue. Bacevich said that the United States’s interests and Israel’s interests may be starting to diverge, pointing to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, the Iran nuclear deal and the settlement movement as examples. Bacevich said that this divergence was “to test the proposition … that the grievances of the Palestinians … somehow define the root cause of anti-Western, anti-American sentiment throughout much of the Islamic world.” He added that the United States may wish to test this proposition because it is unwilling to engage in the long-term conflict that Inbar alluded to. In response to a question from the audience, Bacevich later clarified that he does not believe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root cause of turmoil in the Middle East, only that Americans widely believe it is.

Heschel responded to Inbar’s lecture by asking the audience to remember “that evil is never the climax of history,” and that “peace is made not only by Prime Ministers; it’s made by individual citizens. It’s an individual personal responsibility.” She called on Jews to be more willing to speak to each other about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without fear of being called anti-Israel or anti-Semitic and said that the majority of Israel’s opponents are not opposed to the state itself, but to human rights violations.

Jacoby, in his comments, rhetorically asked whether “it would only have been another few months before [Rabin] pulled the plug on Oslo or whether, like so many of his countrymen, he would have felt wrapped in the belief that if we just try harder, just make more concessions, just offer more to show greater flexibility, peace will come, it will be possible.”

He also criticized Bacevich’s assessment that the United States was diverging from Israel, noting that similar assertions have been made at multiple past stages of the conflict.

He added that “Israel wasn’t created for the sake of peace; it was created so that there would be a Jewish homeland. … Israel has become an economic power, a military power, all without peace ever having been conclusively and firmly established.”

A Boston Globe column by Jacoby published the day after the debate called Oslo “a disaster from the outset” and said that Rabin’s assassination has, in fact, prolonged the failed process.

The event was this year’s Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Lecture at BU’s Elie Wiesel Center.