Policies of Denial: An Interview with Sara Roy

“What I sense most powerfully from my friends in Gaza is a feeling of abandonment.”

Sara Roy

On November 14 the Guardian reported, on the basis of internal military documents, that the United States was “planning for the long-term division of Gaza.” Reconstruction of the devastated territory, according to the report, would begin in the Israeli-controlled half of the Strip, east of the “yellow line,” which dozens of Palestinians have been killed for crossing since a cease-fire went into effect this past October. Last month CNN reported that on November 29 an Israeli drone had killed two children, eight and ten years old, who had crossed the line to gather firewood for their paralyzed father.

“Quiet is not the absence of conflict,” Sara Roy wrote on October 25 in the NYR Online. “Nor is it peace.” In her essay Roy, an associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, surveyed several of the most prominent plans for the “day after” in the Strip, among them Donald Trump’s twenty-point proposal, which was approved by the UN Security Council soon after. All of them, she concluded, “impose forms of governance that exclude Palestinians as political agents, denying them control over decision-making, ensuring that Israel—and by extension the US and EU—retain ultimate power over Palestinian life in Gaza.”

For decades these “forms of governance” have been at the center of Roy’s work. From her influential 1995 study The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development to her books and articles on such subjects as women’s health in the Strip, the failures of the Oslo Accords, and civil society under Hamas, Roy has long been a preeminent expert on the political-economic methods with which—as she put it in her recent essay for the Review—Israel has “thwarted the viable development of the Gaza Strip, with the primary goal of precluding the establishment of a Palestinian state by weakening if not eliminating the economic foundation on which it could be built.” These policies, as Roy explained in our pages in 2023, in effect “created a humanitarian problem to manage a political problem,” turning “ordinary life into war by other means.”

Over the past month Roy and I emailed about her time living in Gaza before the first intifada, the aftermath of Israel’s “disengagement” from the Strip in 2005, and the “polarized and fearful environment” around Palestine studies at universities today.

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Max Nelson: When did you first visit Gaza?

Sara Roy: I went to Israel several times during my youth, but the first time I visited the occupied territories was in the summer of 1985, two and a half years before the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada. I was conducting fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation, which examined a US government program providing economic assistance to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, then a small, NGO-led undertaking of just several million dollars a year. I was studying whether it was possible to promote economic development under conditions of military occupation.

That summer changed my life. It was then that I first experienced—insofar as any foreigner could—the Israeli occupation. I encountered a reality for which I was unprepared and about which I knew too little. I was determined to learn more, and I started immersing myself in the micro- and macro-reality of Palestinian life, in the minutiae of how the occupation worked and the policy imperatives that drove it.

What struck me almost immediately was how thoroughly Israeli policy constrained Palestinian life, determining, for example, where people could work, where they could travel, and which books they were allowed to read. I witnessed firsthand how the occupation (mis)shaped Gaza’s economy and the grinding effects it had on people’s daily routines. I learned what it meant to have little control over one’s life and, more importantly, over the lives of one’s children. I came to understand what it meant for people to live with ambiguity and uncertainty, in the absence of accountability and legal recourse. I have never forgotten how all this affected me.

Something else that I have never forgotten is how, as a Jew, I was treated when I first lived in Gaza, which I’ve written about in these pages. In the days prior to the intifada, one of the first questions I was often asked by Gazans was “Are you a Christian?” I told everyone who asked that I was a Jew. People were surprised, some were shocked, but none were hostile. Most, however, were curious, and I took advantage of their curiosity to explain why I was there—to learn about their lives.

I thought it would take some time to win their trust, but it took no time at all. Within a week of arriving in Gaza I was taken all over the Strip, often to places foreigners seldom if ever saw, helped by people I barely knew. I was invited into homes, both rich and poor, and no request was too excessive. Not only did my being Jewish cease to be a source of concern, it became an advantage. By the end of that summer I knew there was no turning away from Gaza.

You’ve long written about the various policies that Israel has used to, in your phrase, “de-develop” Gaza—to strangle its economy as a way of neutralizing its people’s political demands. You’ve also written about several infrastructure projects that Israel and the US have advocated in the Strip to advance their own policy interests, from the airport in its south to the recurring proposal to build a “floating island” off its coast. How, in the past, have you tended to understand the relationship among these policies, and how do you see this dynamic playing out now, after the cease-fire?

The first thing to note is that actual development—in the sense of sustainable, structural economic change—was never allowed for Palestinians, whether in Gaza or the West Bank, because Israel’s principal political goal from the outset has been to ensure that no viable political or economic entity would ever be established on land Israel claimed as its own. Decades ago a range of Israeli officials made this clear to me, some of them explicitly: in the mid-1980s, for instance, a highly placed officer in Israel’s Ministry of Defense explained to me candidly that real economic development in the West Bank and Gaza could produce a viable economic infrastructure that in turn could provide the political foundation for the establishment of a Palestinian state—which was precisely why it would never be allowed to happen. What did occur, but only intermittently and transiently, were limited periods of economic growth that were largely fueled by foreign assistance.

A crucial feature of Israel’s strategy, especially during and after the first Palestinian uprising, was to divide and separate Palestinians living under occupation, which meant isolating Gaza—the primary source of nationalist resistance—from the West Bank and Jerusalem. Gaza’s political singularity became its defining feature. Its transformation into something distinct and apart, removed from any meaningful political, economic, and social exchange with the rest of Palestine (and Israel), became a cornerstone of Israeli policy, for without Gaza there could never be any viable form of Palestinian sovereignty.

Economic projects like the airport, seaport, or floating island were, then, in no sense designed to give Palestinians greater autonomy or control over their lives. Instead they were part of an unchanged policy that aimed to pacify and ultimately extinguish Palestinian political demands and aspirations by offering limited—and ultimately temporary—economic gains under a deepening and increasingly repressive occupation that denied Palestinians their rights and ensured Israeli control. Rather than expose or change this fundamental deception, the Oslo peace agreements embraced it in a more sophisticated form. Other projects such as industrial estates, infrastructural improvement, and institution-building promised and periodically delivered limited change and ephemeral periods of growth, but always within a structure committed to preventing real economic development.

Israel’s policies of denial continued with great success in the years after my interview with the Ministry of Defense official, causing ever more damage to Palestine’s society and economy, especially in Gaza, where these policies have, in the last two years, assumed their most extreme and destructive expression. The current cease-fire is nothing more than a temporary pause in the violence—if that. It is not a step toward a sustainable resolution. It does nothing to end the occupation; on the contrary, it provides diplomatic cover for the continued dismemberment of Gaza and the intensification of Israeli military control. The late Palestinian economist Yusif Sayigh argued long ago that economic development is an inherent right of Palestinians, but it can never be a solution to long-term occupation. For that, the only solution is liberation.

Over the years you’ve looked at various inflection points in Israel’s policy toward Gaza. Among them is the “disengagement plan” of 2005, when Israel pulled its settlements out of the Strip, shortly before it imposed a blockade on the territory once Hamas took power. At that moment, as you wrote at the time, there was a lot of talk about how Gaza could become what Thomas Friedman called a “Dubai on the Mediterranean.” Are there any lessons from that period in particular that might hold for today?

Israel’s 2005 disengagement was widely seen as the end of its occupation of Gaza. In fact it was no such thing. The settlements were removed, with many of Gaza’s settlers relocating to the West Bank, and the Israeli army redeployed outside Gaza, but Israel retained total control of the Strip’s airspace, territorial waters, population registry, and land borders—which meant control of its economy and the movement of its population (with Egypt enforcing the control of the southern border). Israeli military attacks against Gaza continued, among them Operation Summer Rains in 2006, Operation Cast Lead in 2008–2009, Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, and Operation Protective Edge in 2014, to name just a few.

The argument that Gaza could be turned into a “Dubai on the Mediterranean” (or the “Singapore of the Middle East,” as I also heard it referred to years ago) belies either a cynicism or a misunderstanding of history and context—to put it mildly. Palestinian life in the Strip remained wholly defined by the occupation and the policies shaping it, including Gaza’s enforced separation and isolation from the West Bank, Jerusalem, and beyond. Gaza could no more be turned into a Dubai in 2005—when conditions were far better, relatively speaking—than it can be in its devastated, fragmented state today.

In 2004, when Israel’s disengagement plan was formally presented to the US government by then prime minister Ariel Sharon, I was invited to attend a closed seminar in New York to discuss the economic possibilities that the disengagement presented for Gaza. The meeting was attended by Arab American businessmen and Israeli, Palestinian, and American officials, among others. The Arab American investors wanted to explore the possibility of establishing a free trade zone in Gaza. There was considerable support for the project, particularly from the Israeli officials, although I remember a muted response from the Palestinians. As I recall, the discussion, which was friendly and at times animated, avoided most if not all mention of the occupation.

At one point the chair called on me to comment. Although I felt the discussion was problematic, to say the least, I decided to respond by posing a question to the Arab American businessmen that went something like this: “What guarantees or enforcement measures will you have at your disposal should the Israeli government decide to interfere, restrict, or otherwise impede the functioning of the free trade zone—as, if history is any indication, it inevitably will?” The room fell silent. No one answered. A senior Israeli official sitting next to me could barely contain his anger. He turned to the audience and said, “It appears that Sara Roy does not want to see Gaza develop.” The following year the project was shelved.

You’ve been based at Harvard for many years, over the course of which you’ve seen Palestine studies in the US undergo some dramatic changes. How would you characterize some of the overall shifts in that time, and how might that longer-term background help us understand the current crackdowns on Palestine solidarity protests at universities?

Palestine studies at universities in the US has varied historically from campus to campus. I can only comment on my experience, primarily at Harvard, where the field has changed significantly over the past five decades. (I speak here only for myself and not for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, where I am based.) When I was an undergraduate in the 1970s, it was impossible—unacceptable—to use the word “Palestine” or “Palestinian” politically in a Harvard classroom. This injunction was conveyed implicitly. It was a form of silencing that went unquestioned, and it planted deep roots.

And yet over the ensuing decades faculty (many of whom I had the honor of working with), students, administrators, and other community members did much to widen and deepen the space for discussing the Israeli–Palestinian crisis. It became possible to take a more critical view of dominant constructions, adopt a greater openness to alternative points of view, and allow for different ways of understanding the conflict, historically and politically. This process took a long time and a great deal of hard work. It often involved fraught discussions, and dissenting views still came under periodic attack, but overall the university protected free speech.

Many of these gains dissipated after October 7, 2023. A polarized and fearful environment took hold, nourished in some part by the cancel culture that preceded it. Today the campus appears calmer than it has been at most points over the past two years. But that sense of quiet normalcy can be deceiving. Just a few weeks ago, in a shocking development, the dean of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health removed Mary Bassett as director of the school’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. It was generally understood as yet another attempt by the university to silence work on Palestine; her dismissal follows the suspension, last March, of the Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative at the Harvard Divinity School and the termination, in effect, of my colleagues who directed it, and the forced removal of the director and associate director of my own Center for Middle Eastern Studies within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences that same week.

No center or program is without issues, but accusing any of them of promoting antisemitism is as outrageous as it is false. The weaponization of antisemitism in this way is particularly painful and offensive to me as a child of Holocaust survivors. What is the crime for which we are being silenced? Speaking out against the genocide of the Palestinian people (a genocide acknowledged by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the United Nations Human Rights Council, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’tselem, and Physicians for Human Rights–Israel, among others)? Against carnage? Against racism? As M. Gessen has written, “We are living in an upside-down world.”

The crackdown on legitimate dissent speaks to the denigration of critical thinking. It “empt[ies] words of meaning,” as the scholar Bryan Cheyette has written, which is “the opposite of thought.” This sort of behavior is intolerable, especially in a university setting. It is also dangerous. For if speech discussing or defending Palestinian human rights can be suppressed and vilified, why not speech defending the human rights of others? Where does the silencing and censorship end? As a child of survivors, even asking these questions alarms me more than I can say. Too few people in this country spoke out when six million Jews—among them my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins—were being slaughtered in Nazi death camps. I can assure you that my mother and father, both of whom endured Auschwitz, would be horrified by the silencing of dissent and its unrestrained normalization.

Have you heard recently from any of your friends and contacts in Gaza?

I am in regular touch with friends in Gaza. They are relieved that the daily bombing has stopped, at least for now, but when we correspond they emphasize that the killing and deprivation continue. They report that despite some relative improvements, Israel continues to restrict the entry of desperately needed supplies, including adequate amounts of food. A colleague shared a message she received from her friend in Gaza after she asked him whether the heavy rains in the area had flooded his tent. He replied: “We were drowning, and my mother was drowning, too. I was devastated and almost died. The pressures of winter are not like those of summer. Rain and cold, not enough blankets, clothes and mattresses are soaked, and I’m going crazy. I can’t imagine living in this situation for much longer.”

Amid this quagmire, Palestinians in Gaza are also attempting, however they can, to reengage with life and heal their communities, with a strong focus on children, especially on getting them a formal education and rehabilitating their mental health. Yet what I sense most powerfully from my friends is a feeling of abandonment. Almost all have told me that they remain on their own with no one to ensure their protection—and that the so-called cease-fire will give the world yet another reason to ignore them.

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