Thirteen Days at Camp David

From the fifth to the seventeenth of September 1978, President Jimmy Carter hosted President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel at Camp David, the presidential retreat in the hills of Maryland. Four wars stood between their countries. Thirteen days later the three men signed two frameworks at the White House.

The first, a Framework for Peace in the Middle East, set out principles for the wider region. The second laid the basis for a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. That treaty was signed in Washington on the twenty-sixth of March 1979: the state of war ended, the international border was recognised, and Israel agreed to withdraw from Sinai. The withdrawal was completed on the twenty-fifth of April 1982.

"No more war. No more bloodshed." Menachem Begin, Nobel Lecture, 10 December 1978.

The price of the handshake

Sadat and Begin shared the Nobel Peace Prize for 1978. The peace held, but Sadat paid for it: he was assassinated in Cairo on the sixth of October 1981. The treaty he signed has outlived him by more than four decades, through governments and wars on every side.

Forty-two years later, the treaty between the United Arab Emirates and Israel recalled it by name. The Abraham Accords did not begin in 2020. They began here.