1978 - Camp David Accords

Sources

1. “Camp David Accords” Wikipedia. Accessed April 27th, 2024
2. Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. Cary: Oxford University Press USA - OSO, 2007.

Parties

Bilateral Treaty	—
Purpose	Establishing peace between Egypt and Israel in exchange for Israel returning the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt.
Date	September 17th, 1978
Location	Washington, D.C., United States
Signatories	Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat, Jimmy Carter
Parties	Egypt, Israel
Ratifiers	Egypt, Israel

Causes

• Carter Initiative
  • Carter’s goal was to rejuvenate the Middle East peace process.
  • The Egyptians and Israelis secretly worked towards bilateral talks.

Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 168)

But it took the almost Messianic commitment of President Carter and the most assertive and robust involvement of the United States to save the process from collapse and to force the parties to shoulder the formidable price of peace. ‘None of us believe we have much of a chance to succeed,’ confided Carter to his advisers when he invited the parties to the Camp David presidential retreat for a peace summit.

Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 164)

Sadat had no higher regard for Arafat and the PLO than King Hassan. His weariness with the Palestinians exploded into open rage when in February 1978 the chief editor of Al-Ahram and a personal friend of the President, Yusuf al-Sibai, was assassinated in Cyprus by a Palestinian squad, admittedly belonging to Abu Nidal’s splinter group, not to the PLO. To Sadat this was one more proof that Egypt was mortgaging its future for the sake of a people–‘pygmies’ and ‘hired killers’, as he put it to Israel’s Defence Minister Ezer Weizmann–who did not deserve Egypt’s sacrifices.

Facts

• Participating Parties
  • Carter met with Sadat of Egypt, Hussein of Jordan, Hafez al-Assad of Syria, and Rabin of Israel. Only Sadat and Rabin were interested in negotiations.

Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 172)

Menachem Begin did not make life easier for the American President now desperately shuttling between Cairo and Jerusalem. The Israeli Prime Minister did not have insurmountable opposition at home. But he, or rather his conscience, was his own opposition. In order to calm it down he now had to prove that he, who had betrayed his pledge not to dismantle settlements, would not allow this to become a precedent for the West Bank. He would enhance the building of new settlements in Judaea and Samaria and he would block any possibility of the Palestinian autonomy ushering in a Palestinian state.

• Sadat Initiative
  • Sadat seemed eager to make peace with Israel, even traveling to Jerusalem and speaking in front of the Knesset about potential peace.
  • Egypt wanted to secure a future more in line with its own interests, rather than fixating on being part of the broader Arab collection of countries. There was also a belief that a bilateral peace agreement with Israel would cause a cascade of other peace agreements to happen in following.

Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 87)

By pushing Palestine to the forefront of the struggle against the Jewish state, Nasser radically changed the parameters of the conflict. Now it was no longer just a border dispute between sovereign states, and one that was susceptible to a rational solution, but a conflict of an almost mythological nature over the plight of the Palestinians and their ‘inalienable’ rights, where hardly any room for compromise could exist. It is from this perspective that Sadat’s peace initiative, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, needs to be understood. To make peace he needed to extricate Egypt’s conflict with Israel from the paralysing hold of the Palestinian dilemma into which Nasser had locked it and bring it back to the realm of rationality as a solvable border dispute between two sovereign states.

• Egyptian-Israeli talks
  • Carter pushed both leaders in Camp David for a broad peace agreement between the two.
• Partial agreements
  • The first part of the agreement focused on UN Resolution 242.
    • Wanted to establish self-governing authorities in the West Bank and Gaza strip.
    • Deliberately left out talks about Jerusalem, and neglected the Golan Heights, Syria or Lebanon.
  • The second part of the agreement dealt with Egyptian-Israeli relations.
  • A 5 year plan was given to have the West Bank and Gaza rule themselves autonomously. Again, Jerusalem was not mentioned nor was the Palestinian Right of Return.
• UN Rejection
  • The UN General Assembly rejected the Framework for Peace in the Middle East due to lack of participation of the UN and PLO. It did not comply with the Palestinian right of return, of self-determination and to national independence and soverignty.
  • The part of the Camp David accords regarding the Palestinian future and all similar ones were declared invalid.

Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 170)

It was Menachem Begin, not a left-wing radical, who subscribed at Camp David to such non-Jabotinskian concepts as these: ‘a recognition of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and their just requirements’, ‘the resolution of the Palestinian problem in all its aspects’ and ‘the Palestinians will participate in the determination of their own future’. Moreover, not only did Begin agree to discuss the return to the territories of the displaced Palestinians who left the West Bank during the Six Day War, but he also consented to reopen the 1948 chapter, that is, to negotiate ‘the resolution of the 1948 refugee problem’. And if all this were not enough, Begin succumbed to Carter’s pressure and agreed to ‘Resolution 242 in all its parts’, thus implicitly also endorsing the Resolution’s preamble about ‘the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war’, and its possible applicability to other Arab fronts as well.

Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 170)

It was a capital sin that the Palestinians should have rejected such a golden opportunity to join the Camp David process at a time when the West Bank was still practically free of Israeli settlements. This was a major missed opportunity by the Palestinian leadership. What was proposed to the Palestinians at Camp David, to use Oslo terms, was to turn the whole of the West Bank into Area B, that is, an area of Palestinian administrative rule and Israeli responsibility for security. Today, twenty-five years after Camp David and twelve years into the Oslo process, the Palestinians have hardly 20 per cent of the West Bank as Area B.

Outcome

Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 170)

In the aftermath of the Camp David accords, the Palestinians failed to do what they wisely did in 1988, namely call Israel’s bluff and join the peace process before Israel’s occupation of the West Bank had created an irreversible reality. … At Camp David he fought for every word in the text. That the Palestinians did not call his bluff and instead engaged in a struggle against what Arafat himself called ‘the Camp David conspiracy’ only facilitated the putting into practice of Begin’s grand designs on the West Bank.

Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 178)

Begin’s intention was to signal through his move on the Golan the limits of the peace process, namely that Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai should not be seen by her neighbours as a precedent for other fronts. By pulling out from Sinai, Begin intimated, Israel had fulfilled the territorial aspects of Resolution 242 and no more withdrawals could be contemplated in future peace deals. From now on it would have to be ‘peace for peace’, not ‘peace for land’. Likewise, the annexation of the Golan was Begin’s way of testing the commitment of Egypt’s new President, Hosni Mubarak, to Israel’s concept of a separate peace.

• The Palestinian National Guidance Committee formed in response to the Camp David Accords.

Important Notes