March 26 marked the 47th anniversary of the signing of the peace treaty with Egypt. The treaty was the culmination of a process that began approximately a year and a half earlier when President Anwar Sadat made his historic visit to Israel on November 19, 1977.  That’s a date I will never forget, because as Sadat’s plane was touching down at Ben-Gurion Airport, my firstborn entered this world. In recent years, Yariv has worked to promote Israeli innovation with global corporations and foreign governments, and since October 7 he has struggled to contend with the deterioration in Israel’s international standing. Throughout Yariv’s lifetime, however, relations with Egypt have remained stable and constitute one of the few pillars of foreign policy to have weathered almost two decades of Netanyahu rule.

Although it is often derided as a “cold” peace, the agreement with Egypt survived the Sadat assassination, the fall of Husni Mubarak, a year of rule by Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, and concerns about possible Israeli violations along the border with Egypt during the Gaza war. Diplomatic relations have often been strained in reaction to Israeli-Palestinian hostilities, but there have been no state-level wars since the treaty was signed, and the number of border clashes and security incidents can be counted on two hands.

In 1978, while the Israel-Egypt negotiations were in high gear, Israel launched the Litani Operation aimed at uprooting the PLO bases in southern Lebanon and pushing the PLO north of the Litani River. The operation ended with the establishment of a “security zone” along the border to be overseen by UNIFIL peacekeeping forces. Unsurprisingly, the zone failed to deliver security. Palestinian militias slipped back into the region and continued to use it as a base for attacks.

My second child was a newborn infant in 1982, when then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon launched Operation Peace for Galilee following the attempt to assassinate the Israeli ambassador to the UK. This operation, also known as the First Lebanon War, ended with the expansion of the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)