Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty
On this day · 26 March 1979
In 1979, on the White House lawn, two longtime enemies signed the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state.
On March 26, 1979, at a ceremony on the White House lawn, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed a peace treaty, with U.S. President Jimmy Carter as witness and broker. It was the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state, ending three decades of hostilities that had erupted into four wars.
The treaty grew out of the 1978 Camp David Accords, where Carter had spent thirteen days shuttling between two leaders who could barely stay in the same room. The terms were concrete: mutual recognition, an end to the state of war, normalized relations, and Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula it had captured in 1967.
Sadat and Begin shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize for the effort.
The peace held — but at a cost. Egypt was suspended from the Arab League, and in 1981 Sadat was assassinated by militants enraged at the deal. Decades on, the treaty still stands as a rare durable agreement in the region.
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