Thirteen days, two leaders who barely spoke
President Jimmy Carter convened intensive negotiations at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland from 5 to 17 September 1978, mediating between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin over thirteen days. The two leaders held such deep mutual antipathy that they only rarely had direct contact with one another throughout the process, described in accounts of the talks as being literally not on speaking terms for much of the negotiation. Carter’s role therefore extended well beyond conventional mediation, requiring him to conduct a form of shuttle diplomacy between the two men’s separate cabins, carrying proposals and counterproposals back and forth himself rather than facilitating anything resembling a normal face-to-face negotiation between the two heads of government.
A trip to Gettysburg to break an impasse
Talks reached a genuine impasse on the tenth day, centred on disagreements over Israeli settlement withdrawal from the Sinai and the unresolved status of the West Bank. Rather than let the negotiations collapse at this point, Carter took both leaders to the nearby town of Gettysburg, drawing on the American Civil War battlefield’s historical associations to illustrate parallels with the kind of entrenched, seemingly intractable conflict the two men were being asked to resolve. This unconventional intervention reflected how far Carter was willing to go, using symbolism and personal persistence rather than purely formal diplomatic pressure, to keep two deeply hostile leaders engaged in a process neither seemed naturally inclined to see through to completion on his own.
Two frameworks, one implemented and one not
The resulting accords comprised two separate frameworks with very different eventual fates. The Framework for Peace in the Middle East proposed an autonomous self-governing authority for the West Bank and Gaza Strip over a five-year transitional period, addressing what it called the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people while explicitly excluding the status of Jerusalem from its scope; Begin insisted on full autonomy while stating unambiguously that no Palestinian state would result under any condition. This framework was never meaningfully implemented. The second framework, for an Egypt-Israel peace treaty specifically, proved far more consequential, leading directly and relatively swiftly to a formal, signed peace treaty between the two countries the following year.
Full withdrawal from Sinai, four air bases surrendered
The Egypt-Israel treaty’s core provision required Israel to withdraw its armed forces and civilian settlers entirely from the Sinai Peninsula, territory it had captured from Egypt during the 1967 Six-Day War. This withdrawal included surrendering four air bases Israel had built in the Sinai since 1967 and evacuating some 4,500 civilian settlers from the territory, a process scheduled to unfold over three years. In exchange, Egypt agreed to full normalisation of diplomatic relations with Israel and guaranteed free passage for Israeli shipping through the Suez Canal, terms that together represented the first instance of any Arab state formally recognising Israel and establishing normal peaceful relations with it since the state’s founding three decades earlier.
A Nobel Prize, then a decade of Arab League suspension
International recognition of the achievement came quickly: Sadat and Begin jointly received the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the accords. The reaction within the wider Arab world proved considerably harsher. Egypt faced sustained condemnation from other Arab states for pursuing a bilateral peace with Israel rather than a comprehensive settlement addressing Palestinian statehood alongside broader Arab interests, and the Arab League responded by suspending Egypt’s membership entirely from 1979 until 1989, a full decade of formal regional isolation. Syria in particular declared it would not reconcile with Egypt so long as the agreement stood, reflecting a widespread view among other Arab governments that Sadat had broken ranks and weakened collective Arab leverage against Israel by negotiating separately.
Assassinated for the peace he made
The most severe domestic consequence of the peace came three years after it was signed. On 6 October 1981, during Cairo’s annual military parade, a group of Egyptian Islamic Jihad militants led by Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli attacked Sadat’s reviewing stand with grenades and automatic weapons fire, striking him with 37 rounds; he died roughly two hours later in hospital. The attack killed eleven people in total, including Cuba’s ambassador to Egypt and a Coptic Orthodox bishop, and wounded a further 28, and three of the assassins were executed the following April. Despite this violence and the years of regional isolation that followed, the underlying peace has endured since as what is often described as a cold peace, formally intact even as strategic tensions between the two countries have periodically resurfaced in the decades since.