Anwar Sadat

Muhammad Anwar el-Sadat (1918–1981) succeeded Gamal Abdel Nasser as President of Egypt in September 1970 and reoriented Egyptian foreign policy away from the Soviet Union and toward the United States. In July 1972 he expelled the bulk of Soviet military advisers, signaling a strategic realignment that would define the rest of his tenure.

In October 1973, Sadat coordinated with Syria's Hafez al-Assad to launch a surprise offensive against Israeli forces in the Sinai and Golan Heights, known as the October War (or Yom Kippur War). Although the war ended militarily inconclusively, Egypt's initial crossing of the Suez Canal restored political leverage and Arab confidence, paving the way for negotiations.

Sadat's most consequential act came in November 1977, when he became the first Arab head of state to visit Israel, addressing the Knesset in Jerusalem. This opened the diplomatic track that produced the Camp David Accords in September 1978, brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty signed in Washington on 26 March 1979. Egypt recovered the Sinai Peninsula in stages, completed in 1982. Sadat and Begin shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize.

Domestically, Sadat pursued the Infitah ("opening") economic liberalization, loosening Nasser-era state controls. The peace with Israel, however, isolated Egypt in the Arab world: the Arab League suspended Egypt's membership and moved its headquarters from Cairo to Tunis in 1979 (Egypt was readmitted in 1989). Rising Islamist opposition, sharpened by his crackdown on dissent in September 1981, culminated in his assassination on 6 October 1981 during a military parade in Cairo commemorating the October War. He was succeeded by Vice President Hosni Mubarak.

Sadat remains a pivotal figure in Cold War-era Middle Eastern diplomacy and a recurring reference point in Model UN debates on Arab–Israeli negotiations, normalization, and bilateral peacemaking.