Camp David Accords signed

On September 17, 1978, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David Accords at the White House after twelve days of negotiations at Camp David in Maryland. President Jimmy Carter personally mediated the talks, shuttling between the Egyptian and Israeli delegations as disputes over Sinai, Palestinian autonomy, and diplomatic recognition threatened to break the negotiations. The two signed frameworks committed Egypt and Israel to a peace process that no Arab state had previously accepted with Israel.

The accords addressed the central diplomatic problem left unresolved by the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973: whether Israel would trade occupied territory for formal peace with a major Arab state. Sadat wanted the return of the Sinai Peninsula that Egypt had lost in the Six-Day War, while Begin sought security guarantees and recognition of Israel from the largest Arab army in the region. Carter also viewed the agreement as a Cold War test, because a U.S.-brokered settlement could weaken Soviet influence in the Middle East and reinforce American diplomacy after the trauma of Vietnam.

The Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty signed on March 26, 1979 followed directly from the Camp David Accords and made Egypt the first Arab state to recognize Israel. The agreement also produced the phased Israeli withdrawal from Sinai and established the framework that kept Egypt and Israel from returning to full-scale war in the decades that followed.