Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the Camp David Accords framework, which led to a formal peace treaty between Egypt and Israel the following year. The recognition came after Sadat's historic 1977 visit to Jerusalem, the first by an Arab head of state, broke decades of hostility. Sadat's peace efforts proved deeply controversial in the Arab world and contributed to his assassination by Islamist militants in 1981.
The award recognized an extraordinary diplomatic reversal. Just five years earlier, Egypt and Israel had fought the Yom Kippur War; Sadat's decision in November 1977 to fly to Jerusalem and address the Israeli Knesset stunned the world and infuriated much of the Arab League, which saw it as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause and pan-Arab solidarity.
President Carter brokered the intensive Camp David negotiations in September 1978, during which Sadat and Begin, longtime adversaries, hammered out a framework addressing the Sinai Peninsula's return to Egypt and a path toward Palestinian autonomy, though the latter provisions remained vague and largely unrealized. The Nobel committee awarded the prize before a final treaty was even signed, betting on the framework's promise.
The formal Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty followed in March 1979, and Egypt regained the Sinai. But Sadat paid dearly for his diplomacy at home: the Arab League suspended Egypt, and in October 1981 Islamist military officers assassinated Sadat during a parade in Cairo, partly in retaliation for the peace he had brokered with Israel.