Menachem Begin in the context of "Jewish Agency for Palestine"

Muhammad Anwar es-Sadat (25 December 1918 – 6 October 1981) was an Egyptian politician and military officer who served as the third president of Egypt, from 15 October 1970 until his assassination by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad on 6 October 1981. Sadat was a senior member of the Free Officers who overthrew King Farouk I in the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, and a close confidant of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, under whom he served as vice president twice and whom he succeeded as president in 1970. In 1978, Sadat and Menachem Begin, Prime Minister of Israel, signed a peace treaty in cooperation with United States President Jimmy Carter, for which they were recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize.

In his 11 years as president, he changed Egypt's trajectory, departing from many political and economic tenets of Nasserism, reinstituting a multi-party system, and launching the Infitah economic policy. As President, he led Egypt in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 to regain Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had occupied since the Six-Day War of 1967, making him a hero in Egypt and, for a time, the wider Arab world. Afterwards, he engaged in negotiations with Israel, culminating in the Camp David Accords and the Egypt–Israel peace treaty.

The Egypt–Israel peace treaty was signed in Washington, D.C., United States, on 26 March 1979, following the 1978 Camp David Accords. The Egypt–Israel treaty was signed by Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt, and Menachem Begin, Prime Minister of Israel, and witnessed by Jimmy Carter, President of the United States.

The Camp David Accords were a pair of political agreements signed by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin on 17 September 1978, following twelve days of secret negotiations at Camp David, the country retreat of the president of the United States in Maryland. The two framework agreements were signed at the White House and were witnessed by President Jimmy Carter. The second of these frameworks (A Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel) led directly to the 1979 Egypt–Israel peace treaty. Due to the agreement, Sadat and Begin received the shared 1978 Nobel Peace Prize. The first framework (A Framework for Peace in the Middle East), which dealt with the Palestinian territories, was written without participation of the Palestinians and was condemned by the United Nations.

The agreement sparked broad discontent throughout much of the Arab world, as it was perceived as a unilateral peace initiative that neglected the establishment of a Palestinian state, ultimately seen as weakening the cohesion of the Arab position.

The 1982 Lebanon War, also called the Second Israeli invasion of Lebanon, began on 6 June 1982, when Israel invaded southern Lebanon. The invasion followed a series of attacks and counter-attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) operating in southern Lebanon and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which had caused civilian casualties on both sides of the border. The Israeli military operation, codenamed Operation Peace for Galilee, was launched after gunmen from the Abu Nidal Organization attempted to assassinate Shlomo Argov, Israel's ambassador to the United Kingdom. Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin blamed the PLO, using the incident as a casus belli. It was the second invasion of Lebanon by Israel, following the 1978 South Lebanon conflict.

The Israelis sought to end Palestinian attacks from Lebanon, destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the country, and install a pro-Israel Maronite Christian government. Israeli forces attacked and overran PLO positions in southern Lebanon and briefly clashed with the Syrian Army, who occupied most of the country's northeast. The Israeli military, together with the South Lebanon Army, seized control of the southern half of Lebanon and laid siege to the capital Beirut. The Lebanese Forces however, despite their clandestine alliance with Israel, refused to participate in the war against the PLO as their leader Bachir Gemayel viewed any direct involvement as assisting an invading army. Surrounded in West Beirut and subjected to heavy Israeli bombardment, the PLO and their allies negotiated a ceasefire with the aid of United States special envoy Philip Habib. The PLO, led by Yasser Arafat, were evacuated from Lebanon, overseen by a multinational peacekeeping force. By expelling the PLO, removing Syrian influence over Lebanon, and installing a pro-Israeli Christian government led by President Bachir Gemayel, the Israeli government hoped to sign a treaty that would give Israel "forty years of peace".

The coastal road massacre occurred on 11 March 1978, when Palestinian militants hijacked a bus on the Coastal Highway of Israel and murdered its occupants; 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, were killed as a result of the attack while 76 more were wounded. The attack was planned by the influential Palestinian militant leader Khalil al-Wazir (aka Abu Jihad) and carried out by Fatah, a Palestinian nationalist party co-founded by al-Wazir and Yasser Arafat in 1959. The initial plan of the militants was to seize a luxury hotel in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv and take tourists and foreign ambassadors hostage to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody.

According to Time magazine, the timing was aimed primarily at undermining Israeli–Egyptian peace talks between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat and damaging Israel's tourism sector. However, due to a navigational error, the attackers ended up 64 kilometres (40 mi) north of their target, and were forced to find an alternative method of transportation to their destination.

Foreign relations between Egypt and Israel, which dated back to the 1948 Arab–Israeli War culminated in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and was followed by the 1979 Egypt–Israel peace treaty a year after the Camp David Accords, mediated by U.S. president Jimmy Carter. Full diplomatic relations were established on January 26, 1980, and the formal exchange of ambassadors took place one month later, on February 26, 1980, with Eliyahu Ben-Elissar serving as the first Israeli Ambassador to Egypt, and Saad Mortada as the first Egyptian Ambassador to Israel. Egypt has an embassy in Tel Aviv and a consulate in Eilat. Israel has an embassy in Cairo and a consulate in Alexandria. Their shared border has two official crossings, one at Taba and one at Nitzana. The crossing at Nitzana is for commercial and tourist traffic only. The two countries' borders also meet at the shoreline of the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea.

Peace between Egypt and Israel has lasted for more than forty years and Egypt has become an important strategic partner of Israel. In January 2011, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a former defense minister known for his close ties to Egyptian officials, stated that "Egypt is not only our closest friend in the region, the co-operation between us goes beyond the strategic." Nevertheless, the relationship is sometimes described as a "cold peace", with many in Egypt skeptical about its effectiveness. According to a 2019–2020 survey, 13% of Egyptians support diplomatic recognition of Israel while 85% oppose. The Arab-Israeli conflict kept relations cool and anti-Israeli incitement is prevalent in the Egyptian media.

The Betar Movement (Hebrew: תנועת בית״ר), also spelled Beitar (בית"ר), is a Revisionist Zionist youth movement founded in 1923 in Riga, Latvia, by Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky. It was one of several right-wing youth movements that arose at that time and adopted special salutes and uniforms influenced by fascism.

During World War II, Betar was a source of recruits for both Jewish regiments that fought alongside the British and Jewish groups fighting the British in Mandatory Palestine. Betar was traditionally linked to the original Herut and then Likud political parties of Jewish pioneers, and was closely affiliated with the Revisionist Zionist militant group Irgun. Some of Israel's most prominent politicians were members of Betar (Betarim) in their youth, notably Prime Ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali (14 November 1922 – 16 February 2016) was an Egyptian politician and diplomat who served as the sixth secretary-general of the United Nations from 1992 to 1996. Prior to his appointment as secretary-general, Boutros-Ghali was the acting minister of foreign affairs of Egypt between 1977 and 1979. He oversaw the United Nations over a period coinciding with several world crises, including the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide.

Born to a Coptic Christian family in Cairo, Boutros-Ghali was an academic by training and taught international law and international relations at Cairo University from 1949 to 1979. His political career began during the presidency of Anwar Sadat, who appointed him acting foreign minister in 1977. In that capacity, he helped negotiate the Camp David Accords and the Egypt–Israel peace treaty between Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. He was acting foreign minister until early 1991, when he served as deputy foreign minister for a few months.