[3] The Camp David Accords were the result of 14 months of diplomatic efforts by Egypt, Israel, and the United States that began after Jimmy Carter became president.

[5] Upon assuming office on 20 January 1977, President Carter moved to rejuvenate the Middle East peace process that had stalled throughout the 1976 presidential campaign in the United States.

Following the advice of a Brookings Institution report, Carter opted to replace the incremental, bilateral peace talks which had characterized Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy following the 1973 Yom Kippur War with a comprehensive, multilateral approach.

[4] While Begin, who took office in May 1977, officially favored the reconvening of the conference, perhaps even more vocally than Rabin, and even accepted the Palestinian presence, in actuality the Israelis and the Egyptians were secretly formulating a framework for bilateral talks.

Even earlier, Begin had not been opposed to returning the Sinai, but a major future obstacle was his firm refusal to consider relinquishing control over the West Bank.

By the end of his first year (1977) in office, Carter had met with Anwar El Sadat of Egypt, Hussein of Jordan, Hafez al-Assad of Syria, and Yitzhak Rabin of Israel.

The new Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin however, taking over the office from Yitzhak Rabin in June 1977, specifically demanded that the PLO would be excluded from peace talks.

Ten days after his speech, Sadat arrived for the groundbreaking three-day visit, which launched the first peace process between Israel and an Arab state.

As would be the case with later Israeli–Arab peace initiatives, Washington was taken by surprise; the White House and State Department were particularly concerned that Sadat was merely reaching out to reacquire Sinai as quickly as possible, putting aside the Palestinian problem.

However, Carter felt they were not "aiming high enough" and was interested in the establishment of a written "land for peace" agreement with Israel returning the Sinai Peninsula and West Bank.

[14] Numerous times both the Egyptian and Israeli leaders wanted to scrap negotiations, only to be lured back into the process by personal appeals from Carter.

In response, Carter had the choice of trying to salvage the agreement by conceding the issue of the West Bank to Begin, while advocating Sadat's less controversial position on the removal of all settlements from the Sinai Peninsula.

During this time, Carter even took the two leaders to the nearby Gettysburg National Military Park in the hopes of using the American Civil War as a simile to their own struggle.

[16] Consequently, the 13 days marking the Camp David Accords were considered a success, in part due to Carter's determination in obtaining an Israeli–Egyptian agreement, which represented considerable time focused on a singular international problem.

Likewise, the Israeli delegation had a stable of excellent talent in Ministers Dayan and Weizman and legal experts Dr. Meir Rosenne and Aharon Barak.

Furthermore, the absence of the media contributed to the Accord's successes: there were no possibilities provided to either leader to reassure his political body or be driven to conclusions by members of his opposition.

An eventual scrap of negotiations by either leader would have proven disastrous, resulting in taking the blame for the summit's failure as well as a disassociation from the White House.

The first part of the framework was to establish an autonomous self-governing authority in the West Bank and the Gaza strip and to fully implement Resolution 242.

The withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank and Gaza was agreed to occur after an election of a self-governing authority to replace Israel's military government.

[19] The French historian, arabist, orientalist and professor Jean-Pierre Filiu, diplomatic adviser to three French ministers between 1990 and 2002, and also U.S.-born (with Palestinian roots) historian and Professor Rashid Khalidi, in the years 2013–2014 criticised the concept of 'autonomy' as used in the Camp David Accords: it is "devoid of meaning and content", it does not facilitate Palestinian's "right to liberty and self-determination" (etc.).

[22] The UN General Assembly rejected the Framework for Peace in the Middle East, because the agreement was concluded without participation of UN and PLO and did not comply with the Palestinian right of return, of self-determination and to national independence and sovereignty.

Israel also agreed to limit its forces a smaller distance (3 km) from the Egyptian border, and to guarantee free passage between Egypt and Jordan.

With the withdrawal, Israel also returned Egypt's Abu-Rudeis oil fields in western Sinai, which contained long term, commercially productive wells.

These included an inability to bring the Jordanians into the discussions; the controversy over settlements; the inconclusive nature of the subsequent autonomy talks; domestic opposition sustained by both Begin and Sadat and, in Sadat's case, ostracism and anger from the Arab world; the emergence of a what became a cold peace between Egypt and Israel; and changes in foreign policy priorities including discontinuity in personnel committed to sustaining the negotiating process[.

][20]Historian Jørgen Jensehaugen argues[28] that by the time Carter left office in January 1981, he: was in an odd position—he had attempted to break with traditional US policy but ended up fulfilling the goals of that tradition, which had been to break up the Arab alliance, side-line the Palestinians, build an alliance with Egypt, weaken the Soviet Union and secure Israel.Although most Israelis supported the Accords, the Israeli settler movement opposed them because Sadat's refusal to agree to a treaty in which Israel had any presence in the Sinai Peninsula at all meant they had to withdraw from the entire Sinai Peninsula.

[31] President Sadat's signing of the Camp David Accords on 17 September 1978 and his shared 1978 Nobel Peace Prize with Israeli prime minister Begin led to his assassination on 6 October 1981 by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad during the annual victory parade held in Cairo to celebrate Egypt's crossing of the Suez Canal.