In the spring and summer of 1978, American diplomats tried to find common ground between Egypt and Israel on land Israel had held since the 1967 war. Egypt insisted on Israeli withdrawal to the borders of June 4, 1967, in exchange for security arrangements and minor border changes. Israel rejected withdrawal, above all from the West Bank and Gaza. By late July, the State Department’s historians write, President Anwar Sadat wanted to cut off direct contact with the Israelis. Jimmy Carter called a summit.
It ran at Camp David from September 5 to 17. Three-way meetings soon became impossible, so Carter and his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, shuttled between the Egyptian and Israeli delegations for twelve days. American experts had drafted a treaty text, and it was revised again and again. The Program on Negotiation at Harvard says the Carter administration used its co-founder Roger Fisher’s “one-text” approach in the lead-up to the accords.
On the Sinai, the talks covered the future of Israeli settlements and airbases. The two framework documents signed on September 17 gave Egypt “the full exercise of Egyptian sovereignty” up to the old international border, and Israel the withdrawal of its forces. Then came a list of what could stand where. No more than one Egyptian division within about 50 km of the Suez Canal. Next to Israel, a belt 20 to 40 km wide holding only United Nations forces and civil police with light weapons. Israel, inside 3 km of its own side of the border, could keep no more than four infantry battalions.
Fisher and William Ury retold this in Getting to Yes (1981). In their telling, Israel insisted on keeping some of the Sinai, Egypt on every inch, and people drew map after map dividing it. Behind the positions, they wrote, Israel’s interest lay in security and Egypt’s in sovereignty. “The Egyptian flag would fly everywhere, but Egyptian tanks would be nowhere near Israel.”
The formula did not finish the job. Turning the frameworks into a treaty took six more months. Talks broke down over the timing of withdrawal and Egypt’s obligations to other Arab states. Carter flew to Israel in March 1979, and the text was agreed after compromises that included a U.S. guarantee of Israel’s oil supply. The treaty was signed on March 26. The UN force it relied on never arrived: the Security Council did not approve it, and in 1981 the parties set up the Multinational Force and Observers instead, with the United States pledging a third of the cost. The Palestinian autonomy talks the frameworks had promised produced little.
On April 25, 1982, the Israeli flag came down at Sharm el-Sheikh and Rafah, and the Egyptian flag went up. Israeli troops had removed the last settlers who held out, and the town of Yamit was levelled. “In Sinai, in Yamit, we have reached the red line of our concessions,” Defense Minister Ariel Sharon told his soldiers.
The zones stayed on the map. According to Sami Turjeman, a reserve Israeli major general, Egypt has repeatedly asked since 2012 to send large armored forces into the peninsula to fight militants, and Israel has generally said yes.