Camp David Accords

The Camp David Accords were two framework agreements reached by the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin after nearly two weeks of closed talks hosted by the American president Jimmy Carter in September 1978. Signed at the White House on 17 September, they opened the way to the Egypt–Israel peace treaty of 1979, the first between Israel and an Arab state, and earned Sadat and Begin a shared Nobel Peace Prize. Their provisions on the Palestinians, drafted without any Palestinian participation, were far more contested.

Israel had occupied the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, Gaza and other territories in the Six-Day War of 1967, and the Yom Kippur War of 1973 was followed by step-by-step American diplomacy. Carter, who took office in January 1977, at first wanted a broad settlement through an international conference in Geneva. Sadat, however, pursued direct contact. In November 1977 he announced that he would go anywhere for peace, even Jerusalem, and days later he flew to Jerusalem and addressed the Knesset. Secret Egyptian–Israeli contacts in Morocco had prepared the ground, largely without American knowledge.

The leaders and their delegations met at the presidential retreat in Maryland from 5 to 17 September 1978, away from the press. Relations between Sadat and Begin were so poor that they rarely met face to face, and Carter shuttled between their cabins carrying proposals. The status of the West Bank and the fate of Israeli settlements in Sinai nearly ended the talks on the tenth day, and both leaders threatened to leave more than once. Carter kept them at the table with personal appeals and even took them to the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg.

The first document, the Framework for Peace in the Middle East, proposed an elected self-governing authority for the West Bank and Gaza, a transitional period of up to five years, and later talks on their final status involving Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Palestinian representatives. It spoke of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people but left out Jerusalem and the refugees' claimed right of return, and Begin stated that it did not mean a Palestinian state. The second framework set out terms for an Egyptian–Israeli treaty: Israel would withdraw its forces and some 4,500 civilian settlers from Sinai over three years, giving up its air bases and the Abu Rudeis oilfields, in return for full diplomatic relations, limits on Egyptian forces in the peninsula and free passage through the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran.

The peace treaty followed in March 1979. Ambassadors were exchanged in early 1980 and trade and flights began, though the relationship became a "cold peace". Most Israelis supported the agreements, while settlers in Sinai resisted evacuation without success. In the Arab world the reaction was largely hostile, since many saw Egypt as having made a separate peace at the expense of the Palestinians. Egypt was suspended from the Arab League from 1979 to 1989, and Jordan's King Hussein, who had refused to take part, resented Sadat's offer to speak for him. The United Nations General Assembly rejected the Middle East framework in resolutions of 1978 and 1979, on the grounds that it was concluded without the Palestine Liberation Organization or UN participation.

On 6 October 1981 members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad assassinated Sadat during a military parade in Cairo, in an attack that also killed about ten other people. The Egypt–Israel peace has nonetheless endured. The autonomy plan for the Palestinians was never implemented as written; critics such as the historian Rashid Khalidi argue that its limited concept of autonomy resurfaced in the Oslo Accords of 1993.

Our 1960 map shows Egypt and Israel before the 1967 war, and our 1985 map shows the region after Sinai had been returned to Egypt under the treaty.