On a September night 47 years ago, I sat in a packed House Press Gallery as waves of applause hailed President Jimmy Carter and the leaders of Egypt and Israel for the Camp David accords ending decades of enmity between the two Middle East neighbors.
I was reminded of that Monday as I watched a similar scene unfold in Israel’s Knesset as President Donald Trump basked in acclaim for his success in forging the ceasefire and prisoner exchange ending the brutal two-year Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza.
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Similarly, on that 1978 evening, Carter noted it had been 2,000 years since there had been peace in the Middle East and declared that, “if our present expectations are realized, this year we shall see such peace again.”
Misplaced optimism
But those expectations were not realized. Other Arab nations rejected the agreement, and Israel’s problems dealing with the large Palestinian population in its West Bank, created continuing problems.
Similarly, the creation of a multi-national board to manage reconstruction of Gaza — to be chaired by Trump — won’t solve the more pressing problems of housing its 2 million homeless people, demilitarizing Gaza and integrating the enclave’s surviving Hamas leadership with the more moderate Palestinian Authority on the West Bank.
Trump essentially bypassed those issues, though he told Palestinian leaders, “Now is the time to concentrate on building their people up, rather than tearing Israel down.”
Later, Trump attended a follow-up multi-national conference in Egypt that sought to set procedures to deal with Gaza’s long-term problems. But the aftermath of Camp David should serve to warn him that more far-reaching agreements can prove elusive.
Even that initial agreement between Israel and Egypt nearly fell apart, due to disagreements over the meaning of some of the terms – especially a temporary curb on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Carter had to make a hurried Middle East trip – including a speech to the Knesset – before the two nations formally signed a treaty some six months hence.
And though those accords envisioned a five-year transition period for achieving Palestinian rule in the West Bank, that never happened because the Palestine Liberation Organization and other Arab states said it gave Israel too much leeway to continue expanding the settlements there.
The time for further agreements stretched into months and then years. In 1993 – 15 years later – secret talks during the Clinton administration led to the Oslo accords, under which the PLO recognized Israel, and a Palestinian governing authority was created for the West Bank. But Clinton was unable to forge a lasting peace.
Carter’s political benefits from the Camp David accords were fleeting, though one poll showed his job approval promptly jumped up 13 points. Seven weeks later, his Democrats suffered significant midterm election setbacks, internal party critics of his presidency quickly re-surfaced, and he ultimately lost his own 1980 re-election bid.
But Camp David became his presidency’s historic legacy, and the Israel-Egypt agreement has held. Though Carter failed to win the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize — which Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin shared — he ultimately won the award in 2002 for his global peace efforts.
Netanyahu, who called Trump “the greatest president Israel has ever had in the White House,” announced he was giving him Israel’s highest civilian honor, the Israel Prize. “As to that other prize,” he predicted, “it’s just a question of time. You’ll get it,” a reference to Trump’s desire for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Though Trump lost out this year to Venezuela opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, if there is further progress stemming from the Gaza ceasefire, he could well get it in a year or two.
One big difference
That, of course, is a very big IF. But Trump has one thing going for him here that Carter didn’t, the apparent desire of the region’s most important Arab nations, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to resolve long-standing enmities and achieve a comprehensive agreement. That was not true after the Camp David accords.
Another asset is momentum from the Abraham Accords, which his son-in-law, Jared Kushner negotiated in the closing months of his first term, under which four Arab nations negotiated normal relations with Israel – the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.
A further agreement involving Saudi Arabia’s recognition of Israel was reportedly in the works when the brutal Hamas invasion on Oct. 7, 2023, resulted in the murder of more than 1,200 Israeli civilians, took dozens of hostages and led to Netanyahu’s all-out assault to decimate Hamas.
Ultimately, pressure from Trump forced Netanyahu to accept the cease-fire after his ill-conceived decision to target some Hamas leaders in Qatar last month.
It was Trump’s persistence, all agree, that succeeded where prior efforts had failed. But the next steps remain more vague than the path laid out in the Camp David accords, presumably involving some sort of international stabilization force besides the massive muti-national rebuilding effort.
“Generations from now,” Trump said, “this will be remembered as the moment that everything began to change.” But it will take many months, if not years, for that to become reality.
Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. ©2025 The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
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