For the first time ever, an EgyptAir aircraft laid with the Egyptian flag landed at Ben Gurion Airport on Sunday, October 3. The landing was the first kickoff of a new commercial flight between Israel and Cairo which will run four times a week. While travel has occurred between the two neighbors since the 1980s, flights were made in discreet settings to avoid public hostility.
With the widespread normalization post-Abraham Accords, Egypt and Israel are enabled to publicly deepen their ties. Egypt was the first Arab country to sign a peace deal with Israel in 1979, called the Camp David Accords. The agreement was signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Prime Minister Menachem Begin in Washington DC and was witnessed by American President Jimmy Carter. The agreement called for mutual recognition, and for Israeli troops to release their military hold on the Sinai Peninsula, which had been captured in the 1967 war. Egypt agreed to keep it demilitarized and became the first Arab state to recognize Israel.
While the move caused Egypt to be suspended from the Arab League from 1979 -1989, it also led Sadat and Begin to share the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize. Sadat was assassinated in 1981. Peace between the two states has remained since the agreement, and with more flights planned, diplomatic relations will only continue to develop.
In addition to the first flight, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett met with Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi for the first time in a public meeting since 2011, where they “laid the foundation for deep ties moving forward,” says Bennett.
