In a speech to the UN General Assembly on Sept. 20, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi suggested that Israelis and Palestinians learn from the “wonderful example” of the peace between Israel and Egypt. Indeed, the peace treaty signed in 1979 between Israel and the world’s most important Arab state was joyous news for both sides. This wonderful example, however, also constitutes a grim chapter in the tragic annals of some quarter of a million Palestinians who were dispossessed of their homes in 1967 and whose lands are now being farmed by strangers.

Egypt has been a bitter disappointment to hundreds of thousands of Arab people, specifically, the Palestinians uprooted from their homes in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem in the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Some 250,000 people, a quarter of the territories’ residents at the time, many of them refugees from the 1948 war, were forced into refugee camps in neighboring Arab states (in addition to some 100,000 Syrian refugees from the Golan Heights). Egypt sold them out for a song.

In the Camp David Accords (1978), Egypt committed to establishing a standing committee — along with Israel, Jordan and a self-governing administration from the territories — that would formulate principles for the return of “persons displaced from the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.” This was made contingent on adopting “necessary measures to prevent disruption and disorder.” To be clear, this obscure article does not apply to the issue of the refugees from the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, the resolution of which was put off to eventual negotiations on a permanent settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — in other words, until the coming of the Messiah. Not only that, in 1948, the rationale for prohibiting the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes had been the desire to limit the number of non-Jews in the nascent, sparsely populated State of Israel. Since 1967, uprooted Palestinians have been denied the right to go back to places that are not even under Israel’s territorial sovereignty.

The “continuing committee,” as termed in the 1978 agreement, became a mechanism for avoiding implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 237 (1967), which calls for Israel to allow the residents of the territories who had fled at the start of the fighting in early June 1967 to return home. Fifteen years later, the problem of those uprooted in 1967 was inserted in the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords, signed in September 1993.