Almost immediately after Israel was formed, carved out of the palestinian territories by a U.N. mandate, did it face an attack from all its neighbors, all at once. Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and what would become Jordan launched a frontal assault against Israel — and this, more or less, was the state of affairs through much of Israel’s history. For decades after its founding the country was in an official state of war with many of its neighbors. Fittingly for such a tumultuous region, the first stirrings of peace were ten years in the making and involved a planned invasion.

On this day, September 17, in 1978, Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David Accords, formally declaring peace between the two nations since the beginning of Israel.

Sadat’s Egypt was floundering politically and economically after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when Israel occupied the Sinai peninsula linking the Middle East to Africa. To bring Israel to the negotiating table, he launched an attack to retake the Sinai, on the Jewish Holiday of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Although Sadat was ultimately defeated, he did succeed in extracting some concessions from Israel at Camp David. Both him and Begin received the Nobel Peace Prize the year of the Camp David Accords.