Camp David Accords
The 1978 deal that took Egypt out of the Arab-Israeli conflict, returned Sinai, won two Nobel Prizes, and cost Anwar Sadat his life.
For thirteen days in September 1978, Jimmy Carter locked the Egyptian and Israeli leaders in a presidential retreat in the Maryland woods and refused to let the talks collapse. Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin disliked each other so intensely that after the first days they stopped meeting face to face, and Carter shuttled between cabins with drafts. What emerged ended the possibility of another general Arab-Israeli war, and left the Palestinian question exactly where it was.
Why Egypt moved
The road to Camp David ran through the 1973 war. Egypt's surprise crossing of the Suez Canal did not defeat Israel, but it broke the humiliation of 1967 and gave Sadat something to trade from. He then made a series of choices no Arab leader had made: he expelled his Soviet advisers and turned to Washington, and in November 1977 he flew to Jerusalem and addressed the Knesset. The gesture was electrifying and, in the Arab world, unforgivable.
His calculation was cold. Egypt was spending a crippling share of its budget on the confrontation, had lost Sinai and its oil fields, and was carrying a war it could not win for a cause that was not only its own. Peace bought back the territory and bought in the Americans.
What was signed
The accords were two frameworks. The first covered Egypt and Israel and worked: it became a full peace treaty signed in Washington in March 1979. Israel withdrew from the entire Sinai peninsula by 1982, dismantling its settlements and airbases there, and Egypt became the first Arab state to recognize Israel and open normal diplomatic relations. The border has held ever since, policed by a multinational observer force and underwritten by American money: Egypt and Israel became the two largest recipients of United States foreign aid, an arrangement still running today.
The second framework promised a transitional autonomy for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, with negotiations on final status within five years. No Palestinians were present at Camp David, Begin interpreted autonomy as narrowly as the text allowed, settlement construction continued, and the framework went nowhere. Sadat's critics said he had sold the Palestinians for Sinai. He had.
The price
The Arab League expelled Egypt and moved its headquarters from Cairo to Tunis; most Arab states cut relations. Sadat and Begin shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize. On 6 October 1981, at a parade marking the anniversary of the war that had made his diplomacy possible, Sadat was assassinated by Islamist officers within his own army, one of whom shouted that he had killed Pharaoh. His funeral was attended by three American presidents and almost no Arab leaders.
Why it still matters
Camp David removed the strongest Arab army from the military equation, and no coalition war against Israel has been fought since. Every subsequent Arab-Israeli confrontation has been asymmetric: Lebanon, the intifadas, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iranian proxies. That is a direct consequence of 1978.
It also set the template that later negotiators kept reaching for and never matched: an American president spending enormous personal capital, land traded for recognition, and security guaranteed by subsidy. Egypt's peace is cold, unpopular with its own public, and has survived a revolution, a coup, and repeated wars in Gaza, because both governments find it useful. The unfinished half of the accords, the Palestinian framework, is the piece Oslo tried to complete in 1993 and every effort since has failed to close.