Sara Roy

Recently, I spoke with some friends in Gaza and the conversations were profoundly disturbing. My friends spoke of the deeply-felt absence of any source of protection — personal, communal or institutional. There is little in society that possesses legitimacy and there is a fading consensus on rules and an eroding understanding of what they are for. Sara Roy comments.

One year after Israel’s 2005 “disengagement” from the Strip, which was hailed by President Bush as a great opportunity for “the Palestinian people to build a modern economy that will lift millions out of poverty [and] create the institutions and habits of liberty,” a “Dubai on the Mediterranean” according to Thomas Friedman, Gaza is undergoing acute and debilitating economic declines marked by unprecedented levels of poverty, unemployment, loss of trade, and social deterioration especially with regard to the delivery of health and educational services.

Sara Roy, author of The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development, among other works, is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University. This essay was given as the Second Annual Holocaust Remembrance Lecture at the Center for American and Jewish Studies and the George W. Truett Seminary, Baylor University, on 8 April 2002. The text subsequently appeared in the Journal for Palestine Studies, Vol XXXII, No. 1, Autumn 2002, Issue 125.