Anwar Sadat

Anwar Sadat led Egypt from 1970 until his assassination in Cairo on 6 October 1981. A lieutenant in Gamal Abdel Nasser's Free Officers movement, he succeeded Nasser and pivoted Egypt away from Soviet alignment, reorienting the country toward Washington and market reform. His 1973 Yom Kippur War offensive restored Egyptian military credibility and gave him the political capital for what followed: in November 1977 he flew to Jerusalem and addressed the Knesset, the first Arab head of state to visit Israel since its founding.

Sadat co-signed the Camp David Accords with Menachem Begin in September 1978 under Jimmy Carter's Mediation, and the two men shared the Nobel Peace Prize that year. The accords produced the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty of March 1979: Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and Egypt became the first Arab state to recognise Israel. The cost was immediate: Egypt was expelled from the Arab League, relations with most Arab governments severed, and Sadat himself was shot dead by members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad at a Cairo military parade on 6 October 1981. His successor Hosni Mubarak and later Abdel Fattah el-Sisi preserved the treaty while never rehabilitating Sadat's legacy publicly.

The 1979 treaty remains the only Egyptian-Israeli accord and the template for subsequent normalisation efforts, from the Jordan-Israel Peace Treaty of 1994 to the Abraham Accords of 2020. Each of these explicitly invokes Sadat's precedent. His assassination established a durable lesson in Arab politics: the state interest that drove his decision was rational; the political cost, within the region, was fatal. Whether any contemporary Arab leader can replicate the calculation without paying the same price remains the open question his life poses.