Camp David Accords

Camp David Accords (1978).The Camp David Accords, which outlined a framework for a comprehensive Middle East peace, were initialed on 17 September 1978 by U.S. president Jimmy Carter, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat following a two‐week conference at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains. The Camp David process began in November 1977, when Sadat made an unprecedented visit to Israel, where he told Israeli leaders that Egypt was willing to make a lasting peace if they were willing to withdraw from Arab territory occupied during the 1967 and 1973 wars. Despite encouragement from Washington, the Israeli‐Egyptian negotiations stalled during the spring of 1978, prompting Carter to invite Sadat and Begin to Camp David in September.

Adopting a low‐key approach, Carter was able to make surprising progress on the bilateral Israeli‐Egyptian front. The Israelis indicated that, in return for a formal peace treaty with Egypt, they would pull their troops out of the Sinai Desert and would also dismantle the handful of Jewish settlements recently established in the troubled isthmus. The major sticking point was the fate of the Israeli‐occupied West Bank, an oblong bulge of Jordanian territory that 800,000 Palestinians called home. Fearing that he would be branded a traitor who had sold out the Arab cause if he agreed to a bilateral Egyptian‐Israeli peace treaty without resolving the Palestinian dilemma, Sadat insisted that Begin agree to autonomy for the West Bank Arabs. Unwilling to abandon territory that had been part of ancient Israel and that was now also home to several thousand Jewish settlers, Begin adamantly refused to accept the principle of Palestinian self‐determination on the West Bank. With the two sides deadlocked and the Camp David conference on the verge of collapse, Carter brokered an eleventh‐hour compromise by arranging two parallel but separate agreements, one on the Sinai and the other on the West Bank. Sadat pledged to recognize Israel and to sign a formal peace treaty with Begin in return for an Israeli promise to withdraw from the Sinai. Begin agreed temporarily to suspend Israeli settlements on the West Bank and promised to negotiate “new arrangements” with “representatives of the Palestinian people.”

Implementing the Camp David Accords, however, proved more difficult than Carter and his advisers had imagined. To be sure, the lure of a multi‐billion‐dollar U.S. aid package and the promise that several hundred American troops would monitor the Sinai frontier helped persuade Sadat and Begin to sign a peace treaty in Washington on 26 March 1979, and within three years all Israeli troops and settlers had departed from Egyptian soil. But the West Bank negotiations were stillborn, largely because the Palestinian clauses in the Camp David agreements were subject to radically different interpretations by the Israelis, the Arabs, and the Americans. During the next decade, Begin and his successor, Yitzhak Shamir, expanded the number of Israeli settlements on the West Bank dramatically; the Palestinians responded by launching an uprising—the Intifada—in late 1987, and the peace process stalemated, resuming in earnest only after Yitzhak Rabin was elected prime minister in 1992. The Oslo peace accords hammered out between 1993 to 1995, whereby the Israelis agreed ultimately to grant self‐government to the Palestinians on the West Bank, had their roots in the Camp David Accords of 1978.
[See also Middle East, U.S. Involvement in the.]

Bibliography

Jimmy Carter , Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President, 1982.
Steven Spiegel , The Other Arab‐Israeli Conflict: Making America's Middle East Policy from Truman to Reagan, 1985.
William Quandt , Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics, 1986.

Douglas Little