What did Camp David do to us?

History has taught us harsh lessons, the harshest of which is that hidden decisions are more dangerous than declared ones, and that official agreements and understandings are less harmful than secret understandings.

The cursed Camp David Accords was an embodiment of this exhausting lesson, as it proves that what is undeclared, unofficial and unwritten is the most influential and overwhelming in terms of its outcomes and results. We can say that the current scene in the Middle East, 40 years after the Camp David Accords, when it comes to the Palestinian issue, is a direct result of the secret, undeclared and unstated verbal understandings between Anwar Sadat, the then- president of Egypt, and Menachem Begin, the prime minister of the Zionist occupation government at the time.

We are not talking about secret annexes in Camp David, as the existence of secret annexes has not been proven yet, but rather about verbal understandings announced by the founder of the Camp David process, its director, godfather and political sponsor, the late American President Jimmy Carter. According to what was mentioned in Carter’s memoirs Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President, there were verbal understandings between Begin and Sadat, especially regarding the Palestinian issue, to the effect that the  plan for an autonomous self-governing authority would not lead to a Palestinian state, but this understanding was not officially recorded.

The current situation in the region clearly indicates that everything that is happening seems to be an application of this verbal understanding that is not written in the agreement, which has become sacred to the Zionist occupation. Therefore, talk about a Palestinian state has become an unacceptable and non-negotiable matter to them, and in the view of the extremist Zionists, it is now seen as a hostile discourse that poses a threat to the alleged peace and the security of the region. Their insolence has reached its climax as they now talk about establishing a Palestinian state in Saudi Arabia, not to mention the Israel-American insistence that the area of the Zionist entity is too small and should be geographically expanded in the region. This was explained by extremist right-wing Zionist Bezalel Smotrich, who said that the borders of the Jewish state extend to Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

The lost ‘Arab’: Gaza and the evolving language of the Palestinian struggle

The same thing is found in the 1993 Oslo Accords, which also did not include secret annexes in the literal sense of the term, but it included many details that were not mentioned in the agreement or the discussion of which was postponed. These issues and details gained legal standing amongst the Zionists, despite not existing in the first place, so the Oslo Accords seemed to be another episode in the series of surrenders after Camp David, fragmenting the existing unified Arab position and Arab approach to the conflict. This prompted the Palestinian thinker Edward Said to say that the Oslo Accords was a surrender, because it did not guarantee clear rights for the Palestinians, while granting Israel strategic advantages without explicitly announcing them.

The actual result is that Camp David and the likes have transferred the political reality in the region from the state of “alleged Israel” in the eyes of the Arab political discourse and according to what is in the hearts and consciences of the Arab street, to the state of “alleged Palestine” with the Arabs seen as the intruders in the Middle East region. The Zionists have begun to behave as if it is their Middle East, that they are central to it, and the Arabs are nothing but scattered margins around it, which has been reflected in the Zionist propaganda discourse, based on Israel being the sole standard for judging things and people as good or evil. This is a level of arrogance and conceit that Israel would not have reached had it not found that the essence of the official Arab discourse based on begging for its approval to allow the presence of Palestinians on its margins, and that it does not mention the right of the Arab citizen to security and safety, except as a means to achieve a more important goal, which is the security and safety of the Zionist settler, whom this discourse describes as the “Israeli citizen”.

All this is happening amidst a state of official Arab boredom with the idea of ​​resisting the occupation, and collusion against this project that disturbs those who enjoy relaxing on the pillows of imaginary peace. We have reached the point that Netanyahu’s statements about the presence of the resistance in Gaza seem like a copy of the statements by Arab politicians who reject the resistance movements having a military or administrative role in Gaza. So why shouldn’t Netanyahu brag and confidently say, “Our friends in the Arab countries and the world know that if we do not win, their turn will come.”

This article first appeared in Arabic in Al-Araby Al-Jadeed on 24 February 2025

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.