Sara Roy (Ed.D. Harvard University) is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies specializing in the Palestinian economy, Palestinian Islamism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Dr. Roy is also co-chair of the Middle East Seminar, jointly sponsored by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and co-chair of the Middle East Forum at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
We have been friends for decades, first collaborating in one of the very earliest symposia I created, in 1987’s “The Future of the West Bank and Gaza,” and subsequent lectures, NIMEP projects and including the 2014-15 EPIIC year on the “Future of the Middle East and North Africa.”
Sara spent time doing dissertation fieldwork in Israel and in the Gaza Strip as a research assistant to the West Bank Data Base Project, led by another EPIIC Symposia participant, Meron Benvenisti.
She has written extensively on the Palestinian economy, particularly in Gaza, and on Gaza’s de-development, a concept she originated.
Sara is the author of The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development; Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, and editor, The Economics of Middle East Peace: A Reassessment, Research in Middle East Economics; Gaza: Reflections on Resistance; and Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector. Her forthcoming book, Unsilencing Gaza: Reflections on Resistance, will be published in 2021.
She also has authored over 100 publications dealing with Palestinian issues and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has lectured widely in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Australia among other international venues.
We share the same conviction that “Israel’s occupation is about the domination and dispossession of one people by another. It is about the destruction of their property and the destruction of their soul. At its core, occupation aims to deny Palestinians their humanity by denying them the right to determine their existence, to live normal lives in their own homes. And just as there is no moral equivalence or symmetry between the Holocaust and the occupation, so there is no moral equivalence or symmetry between the occupier and the occupied, no matter how much we as Jews regard ourselves as victims.”
I had the pleasure of assisting her daughter, Annie Schnitzer, in becoming a LEAP Fellow.