Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower and Going Clear: a dramatic day-by-day account of the 1978 Camp David conference, during which President Jimmy Carter brokered a peace treaty between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat-the first treaty in the modern Middle East, and one that endures to this day.

In September 1978, three world leaders-representing Israel, Egypt, and the United States-met at Camp David to negotiate a peace treaty between the two Middle East nations. Just six months prior, Palestinian militants had murdered dozens of Israelis north of Tel Aviv. Israel had responded by invading southern Lebanon, killing over a thousand Palestinians. During the thirteen-day conference, Begin and Sadat got into screaming matches, had to be physically separated, and each attempted to walk away multiple times. Yet a peace agreement emerged, and has stood for thirty-five years. In these pages, Wright delves deeply into the issues and enmities between Egypt and Israel, contextualizing the conflict and the major participants at the conference-from the three heads of state to their mostly well-known seconds working furiously behind the scenes. What emerges is not what we've come to think of as an unprecedented yet "simple" peace. Rather, Wright reveals the full extent of Carter's persistence in pushing peace forward, the extraordinary way in which the participants at the conference-many of them lifelong enemies-attained it, and the profound difficulties inherent in the process and its outcome.