Overview

This volume is part of a Foreign Relations subseries that documents the most important foreign policy issues of the Jimmy Carter administration. The focus of this volume is the Carter administration’s efforts to help negotiate settlements to the Arab-Israeli dispute. The volume begins in January 1977, and documents the administration’s immediate efforts to find a comprehensive settlement between Israel and Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, and to seek a resolution for Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. The first part of the volume documents the administration’s initiatives to reconvene the Geneva Conference, which was first established in December 1973 to find a comprehensive settlement to the Arab-Israeli dispute. After talks with the various parties stagnated and Sadat made his momentous visit to Jerusalem in November 1977, the administration came to view a bilateral negotiation between Egypt and Israel as the most realistic avenue to an eventual settlement. Accordingly, the portion of the volume covering the period from December 1977 to August 1978 documents the ways in which the administration worked to find a path to a bilateral peace agreement that would also include limited self-rule for Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. The volume concludes with the White House announcement of a summit to be held at Camp David, Maryland in September 1978, where U.S. officials would work in seclusion with Egyptian and Israeli officials in an attempt to produce an agreement.