In 1977 Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat (1918–1981), negotiated a peace settlement with Israel known as the Camp David Accords. Each country gained: Egypt got back the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had taken in the 1967 Six-Day War (see Map 31.3), and Israel obtained peace and normal relations with Egypt. Israel also kept the Gaza Strip. Some Arab leaders denounced Sadat’s initiative as treason.

After Sadat was assassinated by Islamic radicals in 1981, Egyptian relations with Israel deteriorated, but Egypt and Israel maintained their fragile peace as Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, took office. In return for helping to stabilize the region, the United States gave Egypt billions of dollars in development, humanitarian, and military aid. This aid failed to yield economic development, and Mubarak ruled with an increasingly dictatorial hand, silencing all opposition and punishing, torturing, and killing anyone perceived as a threat to his rule.

In December 2010 demonstrations broke out in Tunisia against the twenty-three-year authoritarian rule of President Zine Ben Ali, leading to his downfall on January 14, 2011. This populist revolt soon spread across North Africa and the Middle East, including Egypt. After three weeks of increasingly large demonstrations, coordinated through social media, Mubarak stepped down as president in 2011 and was arrested soon after. Libya, located between Tunisia and Egypt, also witnessed an uprising against its dictatorial leader of forty-two years, Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi struggled violently to remain in power, but was deposed and killed amid European and U.S. air strikes. That same year, a lengthy and intense civil war erupted in Syria.

The “Arab Spring” uprisings that swept the Middle East shook a political order that had rested in the hands of the armed forces and pursued secular, nationalist objectives. The reaction against these regimes was often religious and culturally conservative. The political transitions resulting from this upheaval tended to pit secular and religious factions against each other amid debates over the nature of government and social reform.