The Camp David Curse

Egypt’s 1979 peace with Israel redefined the Middle East, but also fractured the Arab front, turning Cairo into both the region’s indispensable peacemaker and its reluctant jailer.

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (left), U.S. President Jimmy Carter (center) and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin shake hands at the conclusion of the Camp David Peace Accords signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House on September 17, 1978.

After two years of unrelenting bloodshed, the guns in Gaza have fallen silent. A ceasefire improbably brokered by U.S. President Donald Trump has paused a war that has claimed over 67,000 Palestinian lives while leaving Israel scarred by the memories of October 7, 2023 when Hamas militants killed 1,200 civilians while triggering the war that has led to Gaza’s near-total obliteration by intense bombing and shelling.

Whether the Gaza truce translates into a durable peace depends less on Trump’s theatrics and more on whether Palestinians can rebuild credible institutions free from Hamas’s theocratic grip and whether Israel can accept that occupation and democracy cannot indefinitely share the same soil.

But Trump’s triumphal address to Israel’s Knesset, recalled an earlier moment of theatre in the last century – when late Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat stood on that same floor in 1977, breaking Arab taboos and calling for peace.

It was the first time an Arab leader had officially visited Israel and spoken before its parliament. In that speech, Sadat called for an end to hostilities and recognition of Israel’s right to exist, laying the groundwork for the Camp David Accords (1978) and the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty (1979).

Today, while Trump’s deal was being sealed through spectacle, the hard work of mediation was happening elsewhere in Cairo’s smoky intelligence offices, where Egyptian officers shuttled between Hamas envoys and Israeli negotiators. Once again, Egypt had been called upon to pick up the pieces of a broken peace.

That role was not thrust upon Egypt by geography alone. It was earned and cursed at Camp David in 1978.

Risky gamble

Anwar Sadat’s decision to visit Jerusalem in November 1977 had stunned the Arab world. It was the boldest gesture any Arab leader had made toward Israel since its founding in 1948.

Sadat’s motives mixed idealism with cold strategy. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War restored some Arab pride but exhausted Egypt’s economy, Sadat sought to recover the Sinai Peninsula and redirect resources toward development. In return, he offered recognition of Israel’s right to exist - the unthinkable concession in Arab politics.

The Camp David Accords, brokered by President Jimmy Carter in 1978, produced two frameworks: one for peace between Egypt and Israel, the other for Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza under UN Resolution 242’s “land for peace” formula. Only the first survived. While Egypt regained Sinai in 1982, the Palestinians gained a promise that vanished into diplomatic fog.

The costs of Sadat’s gambit were immediate. Egypt was expelled from the Arab League, its embassy in Israel was shunned, and Sadat himself was gunned down by Islamist militants in 1981. Yet the peace endured, cemented by U.S. military aid and a shared interest in regional stability. Egypt had traded pan-Arab leadership for American patronage and became the first Arab state to make a separate peace with Israel. In many ways, that bargain would become the region’s defining template, and its undoing.

Before Camp David, Arab diplomacy operated by consensus. The 1967 Arab League summit at Khartoum had declared the famous ‘three NOs’ - no recognition, no negotiation, no peace with Israel. However, Sadat’s defection shattered that front.

The peace with Egypt reassured Israel that regional acceptance could be achieved without resolving the Palestinian question. The lesson was absorbed quickly. Jordan followed in 1994 with its own treaty, gaining U.S. support and border guarantees. The Oslo Accords of 1993, brokered again by Washington, replicated the bilateral logic of security for Israel and limited autonomy for Palestinians.

Each successive deal was narrower than the last. Collective Arab bargaining gave way to side-arrangements, each driven by local interests and external incentives. Israel’s neighbours discovered that a peace treaty was a passport to Washington’s favour.

For Egypt, the rewards were tangible: $1.3 billion in annual U.S. military aid, the return of Sinai, and a status as Washington’s ‘anchor of moderation.’

However, peace with Israel was never popular among Egyptians, who saw it as a betrayal of Palestinian kinship. Successive regimes from Hosni Mubarak to Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi have maintained the treaty out of necessity, not conviction.

Thus, was born the Camp David Curse - a peace that secured Egypt’s borders but stranded its politics between moral solidarity and strategic dependence.

Over the decades, Egypt’s role evolved from combatant to custodian. Every round of fighting in Gaza - 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021 and now 2023-25 - has ended with Egyptian mediation. Cairo controls Rafah, Gaza’s only gateway to the outside world not sealed by Israel. It opens or closes the crossing to manage pressure, balancing humanitarian duty against security coordination with Israel.

This leverage has made Egypt indispensable. It is trusted enough by Israel to guarantee ceasefire terms and credible enough to engage with Hamas, which it also views warily because of its ideological kinship with Egypt’s outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.

Amid the ruins of Middle Eastern geography, Egypt has re-emerged as the region’s pragmatic custodian. Its intelligence service mediates between Israelis and Hamas. Of course, Cairo’s motives are far from altruistic. It seeks stability in Sinai, prestige in Washington and leverage over the Gulf. But Egypt’s involvement underscores the deeper truth that in a land where borders are porous and sovereignties incomplete, only neighbours can enforce the illusion of orderPragmatic broker

Egypt ‘manages’ violence rather than resolves its causes. The demilitarised status of Sinai which was written into the 1979 treaty limits its own manoeuvre. Israeli drones patrol the border; Egyptian troops require permission to reinforce positions in northern Sinai, where jihadist insurgencies simmer.

Cairo’s diplomats privately admit their ambivalence wherein they safeguard a peace that stabilises Israel’s frontiers while perpetuating Palestinian isolation. Yet in the eyes of Washington and Tel Aviv, Egypt remains a pragmatic broker in a region of extremes.

The pattern has repeated itself across decades: peace conferences heavy on ceremony, light on enforcement. Camp David’s ‘Palestinian autonomy’ plan was never implemented. Oslo’s promise of a Palestinian state within five years dissolved amid settlements and suicide bombings. The Abraham Accords of 2020 normalised Israel’s ties with Gulf monarchies without mentioning occupation at all.

Now, the 2025 Gaza truce following a war that devastated the enclave revives the old language of the two-state solution.

Yet the geography of that vision has all but vanished. Israeli settlements carve the West Bank into disconnected enclaves.

Palestinians are twenty times poorer than Israelis, living under military law while their neighbours enjoy one of the world’s most dynamic economies.

Even so, when one cares to take a long view, Egypt’s peace with Israel that was once derided as a ‘betrayal’ now appears prophetic. Sadat’s gamble bought Egypt four decades of stability and made it indispensable to every subsequent negotiation.

The Camp David peace endures because it serves immediate interests. But it also ensures that Egypt will forever be both mediator and warden, attempting to stabilize a region whose injustices it helped to freeze in place.

Sadat once declared that “there can be no peace without the Palestinians.” Ironically, his treaty delivered peace without them. That, perhaps, is its curse.