Five different events are being held in Israel to mark 40 years since the groundbreaking signing on the White House Lawn on March 26, 1979, of the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord.
Tellingly, only one commemorative event is being held in Egypt, and that one is being sponsored by the US Embassy in Cairo, said Ofir Winter, a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
Winter's comments came at one of those Israel events: an all-day symposium last week at Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Truman Institute that looked at different aspects of the peace agreement.
“The peace is not an event celebrated in Egypt,” Winter said. “If the peace is mentioned, it is within the context of the October War that led to the peace, and more importantly, led to the liberation of the Sinai.”
Those were intoxicating days, March 1979, when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, prime minister Menachem Begin and US President Jimmy Carter clasped hands on the White House lawn and signed the landmark “Framework for Peace in the Middle East.”
