by Imonikhe Ahimie

Created on: August 16, 2009   Last Updated: September 17, 2009

The Camp David Accords were two landmark agreements reached between Egypt and Israel following days of negotiations between both countries at the US President's retreat at Camp David, Maryland, USA. The Accords were signed by then President Anwar El Sadat (1918-1981) on behalf of Egypt and then Prime Minister Menachem Begin (1913-1992) on behalf on Israel. The Accords set out the modalities of a future peace treaty between Israel and Egypt as well as for the creation of an autonomous Palestinian homeland in the Israeli occupied territories and they were mediated by then US President Jimmy Carter. The Accords were signed by the Egyptian and Israeli leaders on 17 September 1978. A substantive peace treaty was singed 26 March 1979 at Washington, DC, USA, although the Accord relating to a homeland for the Palestinians remained merely a piece of paper. On the basis of the Camp David Accords, both Sadat and Begin were jointly awarded the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize, and Sadat was chosen by Time Magazine, the American publication as its Man of the Year, 1978.

The road to Camp David began in January 1978, following Jimmy Carter's inauguration as President of the United States. Determined to add a new fillip to the Middle East peace process which had ground more or less to a halt during the presidential campaign season, the new US President decided to jettison the bilateral approach which had been the American approach in the past and to adopt a multilateral approach, as proposed by the Brookings Institution in a report released in December 1975, which would address all issues in contention between Arabs and Israelis and which would include a Palestinian delegation. In order to give this approach the greatest chance of success, the US President paid personal visits to those leaders whose involvement he considered most crucial to the success of this policy, including Sadat; the Jordanian king, Hussein (1935-1999); the Syrian President, Hafez Al Assad (1928-2000); and the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin (1922-1995). Although the Syrian reaction to the US proposals were less than enthusiastic, along with some other Arab countries, such as Libya, Iraq and Lebanon, and those communist countries (Hungary, Albania, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria) which had fought alongside Egypt and Syria in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, the US President had grounds to be optimistic about the success of his plans. The intention was to reconvene the 1973 Geneva Peace Conference, which had long

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