For decades, diplomats have treated the Camp David Accords as a cornerstone of regional stability—a treaty that removed Egypt from the circle of belligerents and reshaped Israel’s strategic environment. Officials often discuss the agreement in binary terms: either upheld or violated. Yet this framing obscures a more consequential question. What happens when a party honors a treaty in form but erodes it in function?
Camp David’s durability has rested less on ceremonial compliance than on a specific security logic: a demilitarized Sinai, effective enforcement, and Egyptian responsibility to prevent the peninsula from becoming a conduit for armed threats to Israel. The treaty did not merely end a war; it created assumptions that have shaped U.S. and Israeli policy for nearly half a century. The problem today is that those assumptions may no longer reflect reality.
Egypt has not formally abrogated Camp David, nor has it openly re-militarized the Sinai in defiance of its annexes. Instead, the erosion has been incremental, marked by selective enforcement, permissive tolerance, and plausible deniability. Over time, these small deviations have accumulated into a strategic drift that calls into question whether the security environment envisioned in 1979 still exists.
The erosion has been incremental, marked by selective enforcement, permissive tolerance, and plausible deniability.
Nowhere is this clearer than along the Gaza-Egypt border. For years, an extensive network of smuggling tunnels operated beneath Rafah, enabling Hamas to import weapons, materials, and expertise. These tunnels were not a secret. Their scale—industrial rather than opportunistic—raised questions. The Sinai Peninsula is vast and sparsely populated, but it is not opaque. Large-scale movement of materiel does not occur without some state awareness.
The issue is not whether Egypt signed off on Hamas’s war plans; rather, the issue is whether long-standing tolerance of cross-border smuggling hollowed out the enforcement assumptions underpinning Camp David. If the treaty presumes Egyptian responsibility for preventing the Sinai from becoming a logistics corridor for Israel’s enemies, then the sustained operation of the Rafah tunnel system represents less a tactical lapse than a structural failure.
This failure matters because policy often lags behind reality. Washington and Jerusalem have continued to treat Cairo as an anchor, calibrating aid, arms sales, and diplomatic deference accordingly. That posture may have been justified when Sinai demilitarization functioned as intended. It becomes harder to justify when the peninsula effectively serves as a rear area for groups committed to Israel’s destruction.
The danger here lies not in overt betrayal but in assumption drift. Over time, incremental exceptions—expanded Egyptian deployments approved to combat the Islamic State, temporary security accommodations, localized enforcement failures—have altered the security landscape without triggering a reassessment of the framework. The treaty remains intact on paper, but its deterrent logic has weakened in practice.
October 7, 2023, forced a reckoning across multiple fronts. One of its underexamined implications is what it revealed about the cumulative effects of permissive environments beyond Gaza itself. Hamas did not build its arsenal in a vacuum. The tunnels beneath Rafah were not engineering feats; they were symptoms of a broader enforcement problem that had been normalized over time.
This raises a necessary question: At what point does adherence to outdated assumptions become a liability? Treaties are not self-executing. They rely on active maintenance, enforcement, and reassessment as conditions change. When violations are informal and incremental, they are easier to ignore—but their strategic impact can be just as severe as formal breaches.
Treaties are not self-executing. They rely on active maintenance, enforcement, and reassessment as conditions change.
None of this requires attributing malign intent to Cairo. States often prioritize regime stability, internal threats, and regional maneuvering over the letter of distant obligations. The problem arises when partners mistake inertia for alignment. Stability becomes performative rather than real.
If Camp David is to remain a meaningful pillar of regional security, diplomats and policymakers must evaluate it not only by whether its text is observed, but by whether it fulfills its purpose. That evaluation should be sober, unsentimental, and grounded in evidence rather than legacy assumptions. The alternative is to continue operating within a framework that no longer constrains the threats it was designed to prevent.
Strategic clarity begins with asking the right questions. Has the Sinai remained functionally demilitarized in the way Camp David intended? Has Egypt fulfilled its enforcement role in a manner consistent with the treaty’s security logic? And if the answers are ambiguous, what adjustments—diplomatic, military, or conditional—are required to restore credibility?
These are not hostile questions. They are necessary ones. Treaties endure not because they are revered, but because they are continually tested against reality—and revised when reality changes.
