Camp David 1978
The religious-textual stakes at Camp David in September 1978 ran beneath the diplomatic surface. Sinai, the territory placed on the negotiating table, is the very wilderness through which the Israelite tradition…
Biblical Narrative
The religious-textual stakes at Camp David in September 1978 ran beneath the diplomatic surface. Sinai, the territory placed on the negotiating table, is the very wilderness through which the Israelite tradition locates the giving of the Torah. For Menachem Begin, formed in the Revisionist Zionism of Ze'ev Jabotinsky and the religious-national milieu of interwar Brisk, the Land of Israel was a covenantal trust — but Sinai itself, lying outside the boundaries promised in Genesis 15 and Numbers 34, fell beyond the covenanted patrimony. This textual distinction is what allowed Begin, alone among Israeli prime ministers, to relinquish conquered territory without contradicting the religious-Zionist frame from which he drew authority.
Anwar Sadat's framing was equally textual. His public addresses repeatedly invoked the figure of Joseph and the abrahamic kinship of the three monotheistic faiths; his unprecedented November 1977 address to the Knesset opened with the al-Fatiha and quoted the Qur'anic verses on Bani Isra'il. In Islamic juridical tradition the question of treaty with a non-Muslim polity holding lands once part of dar al-Islam is governed by the doctrines of sulh (reconciliation) and hudna (truce); Sadat's clerical advisers at al-Azhar, led by Sheikh Abd al-Halim Mahmud, supplied the fatwas that reframed the negotiations as a permissible sulh rather than a forbidden surrender.
The thirteen days of negotiation, mediated by Jimmy Carter — a Southern Baptist who read Scripture daily and at one point produced a hand-written list of the names of Sadat's grandchildren to break a deadlock — turned repeatedly on the question of Jerusalem and the West Bank, which Begin called by their biblical names, Judea and Samaria. The framework agreement signed on 17 September 1978 deferred those questions. The autonomy formula for the Palestinian inhabitants drew, in Begin's drafting, on the millet system of the Ottoman period rather than on any biblical model; he refused the language of sovereignty.
The peace treaty itself, signed in Washington on 26 March 1979, was framed by both leaders in scriptural cadence. Sadat cited the prophet Isaiah's vision of swords beaten into plowshares; Begin quoted Psalm 126. The religious framing did not prevent the treaty's domestic costs: Sadat was assassinated on 6 October 1981 by members of al-Jihad al-Islami who had obtained a fatwa from the blind sheikh Omar Abd al-Rahman declaring him an apostate ruler under the doctrine of takfir.
No more war, no more bloodshed, no more bereavement.Anwar Sadat, address to the Knesset, 20 November 1977
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The strategic context for Camp David was the aftermath of the October 1973 war and the disengagement agreements brokered by Henry Kissinger in 1974 and Sinai II in September 1975. By 1977 Egypt was bankrupt: Sadat's infitah economic opening had failed to attract Western capital while Soviet aid had ended after the 1972 expulsion of advisers. William Quandt's authoritative study Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics (Brookings, 1986), drawing on declassified NSC files, demonstrates that Sadat's November 1977 Jerusalem visit was preceded by secret Moroccan-mediated contacts in Rabat between Hassan Tuhami and Moshe Dayan two months earlier.
The Camp David summit ran 5 to 17 September 1978. Carter's preparation, documented in Lawrence Wright's Thirteen Days in September (2014) and in Carter's own Keeping Faith (1982), drew on intelligence profiles prepared by the CIA's Office of Political Analysis and on a behavioral study commissioned from psychiatrists at Walter Reed. The two framework documents signed on 17 September — A Framework for Peace in the Middle East and A Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty Between Egypt and Israel — were drafted principally by Carter aide William Quandt and Israeli legal adviser Aharon Barak, later President of the Israeli Supreme Court.
The substantive trade was clear: full Israeli withdrawal from Sinai, including the dismantling of the airfields at Etzion and Eitam and the Yamit settlement bloc, in exchange for full Egyptian recognition, demilitarization of Sinai under a multinational force (the MFO, headquartered at El Gorah), and freedom of navigation through the Strait of Tiran and the Suez Canal. Side letters on Jerusalem and on the freezing of West Bank settlements were drafted but their interpretation was disputed almost immediately — Begin maintaining the freeze covered only three months, Carter insisting on the duration of autonomy negotiations.
The treaty's strategic effects have been analyzed in Kenneth Stein's Heroic Diplomacy (1999) and in the Israeli historiography of Itamar Rabinovich. Egypt's removal from the Arab military coalition rendered a coordinated conventional war against Israel structurally impossible after 1979 — a fact the 1982 Lebanon war, the 2006 Hezbollah war, and the 2014 Gaza war all confirmed by their limited geographic scope. The Arab League's response was the Baghdad Summit resolution of November 1978, which suspended Egypt's membership and moved the League's headquarters to Tunis until 1989.
Camp David was not a great strategic miracle. It was the codification, in legal and territorial form, of facts the 1973 war had already established on the ground.Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall (2000)