Public Support
Although most Israelis supported the Accords, the Israeli settler movement opposed them because Sadat would not agree to a treaty in which Israel had any presence in the Sinai Peninsula at all, Israel had to withdraw from the entire Sinai Peninsula. Israeli settlers tried to prevent the government from dismantling their settlements.
In Israel, there is lasting support of the Camp David Peace Accords, which have become a national consensus, supported by 85% of Israelis according to a 2001 poll taken by the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies (Israel based). Nevertheless, a minority of Israelis believe the price Israel paid for the peace agreement was too high for its present gains, i.e. having relinquished the entire Sinai Peninsula, with its oil, tourism and land resources (Israel has no other oil wells), and the trauma of evacuating thousands of its Israeli inhabitants (many resisted, as in the town of Yamit and had to be forcefully evacuated, a phenomenon encountered also in the subsequent Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, known as the disengagement).
For Israel, perhaps the most evident tangible benefit of the agreement with Egypt (other than the subsequent U.S. aid, which Egypt also received) was a peaceful mutual border, enabling the Israel Defense Forces to reduce their levels of alert on Israel's southwestern frontier.
Read more about this topic: Camp David Accords
Famous quotes containing the words public and/or support:
“The Indian attitude toward the land was expressed by a Crow named Curly: “The soil you see is not ordinary soil—it is the dust of the blood, the flesh, and the bones of our ancestors. You will have to dig down to find Nature’s earth, for the upper portion is Crow, my blood and my dead. I do not want to give it up.””
—For the State of Montana, U.S. public relief program. Montana: A State Guide Book (The WPA Guide to Montana)
“In the middle years of childhood, it is more important to keep alive and glowing the interest in finding out and to support this interest with skills and techniques related to the process of finding out than to specify any particular piece of subject matter as inviolate.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)