Sadat's Visit to Jerusalem

On the evening of Saturday 19 November 1977, as Shabbat ended, an Egyptian plane landed at Ben Gurion Airport and President Anwar Sadat stepped out to be welcomed by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, President Ephraim Katzir, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon. Ten days earlier Sadat had told the Egyptian parliament that he would go to the ends of the earth for peace, even to the Knesset itself, and Begin had invited him. Only four years after Egypt's surprise attack on Yom Kippur, it was the first open visit of an Arab head of state to Israel. The next day Sadat prayed at al-Aqsa, laid a wreath at Yad Vashem and addressed the Knesset in Arabic.

Begin answered him from the same rostrum. The visit broke the Arab world's refusal to recognize or talk to Israel. It led, within a year, to the Camp David Accords and, in March 1979, to the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty, the first peace between Israel and an Arab state, and it made the impossible look possible to a generation of Israelis who had known only war with Egypt.