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Sara Roy
Sara M. Roy (born 1955) is an American political economist and scholar. She is a Research Associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.
Roy's research and over 100 publications focus on the economy of Gaza and more recently on Hamas. Reviewing her 2007 Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, Bruce Lawrence writes that "Roy is the leading researcher and most widely respected academic authority on Gaza today," and she considers the Gaza Strip her second home. She has also studied Palestinian politics and the broader Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Roy was born and raised in West Hartford, where she attended Hall High School. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard College. She currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts.[citation needed]
She is the daughter of Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust. In a lecture she stated that "the Holocaust has been the defining feature of my life" as part of the Second Annual Holocaust Remembrance Lecture, which she delivered at the George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University. Roy had been invited by Center for American and Jewish Studies founding director Marc H. Ellis to connect her family's experience in the Holocaust to her academic work on the Palestinian people. Roy explained that both her parents had survived the Holocaust, but that 100 members of her extended family, who had resided in the Jewish shtetls of Poland, had been killed. Her father, Abraham Rój, was one of the seven known survivors of the Chelmno extermination camp, while her mother, Taube, survived Halbstadt (Gross Rosen) and Auschwitz. In an article in CounterPunch, Roy wrote that while her mother was confined in the Lodz ghetto she endeavoured to hide children destined for deportation to the Nazi extermination camps, but they were seized and despatched to Auschwitz.
Roy earned an Ed.D. with a specialization in International Development from Harvard University's Graduate School of Education in 1988.[citation needed]
Having visited Israel many times when she was growing up, she added, "[i]t was perhaps inevitable that I would follow a path that would lead me to the Arab-Israeli issue", providing several examples of parallels between Nazi treatment of Jews "in the 1930s, before the ghettos and death camps", and Israeli soldiers' treatment of Palestinians which, in her opinion, "were absolutely equivalent in principle, intent, and impact: to humiliate and dehumanize."
She further developed these themes in the 2008 Edward Said Memorial Lecture at the University of Adelaide, in which she said:
"Israel's occupation of the Palestinians is not the moral equivalent of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. It does not have to be. The fact that it is not in no way tempers the brutality of the repression, which has become frighteningly normal. 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."
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Sara Roy
Sara M. Roy (born 1955) is an American political economist and scholar. She is a Research Associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.
Roy's research and over 100 publications focus on the economy of Gaza and more recently on Hamas. Reviewing her 2007 Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, Bruce Lawrence writes that "Roy is the leading researcher and most widely respected academic authority on Gaza today," and she considers the Gaza Strip her second home. She has also studied Palestinian politics and the broader Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Roy was born and raised in West Hartford, where she attended Hall High School. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard College. She currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts.[citation needed]
She is the daughter of Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust. In a lecture she stated that "the Holocaust has been the defining feature of my life" as part of the Second Annual Holocaust Remembrance Lecture, which she delivered at the George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University. Roy had been invited by Center for American and Jewish Studies founding director Marc H. Ellis to connect her family's experience in the Holocaust to her academic work on the Palestinian people. Roy explained that both her parents had survived the Holocaust, but that 100 members of her extended family, who had resided in the Jewish shtetls of Poland, had been killed. Her father, Abraham Rój, was one of the seven known survivors of the Chelmno extermination camp, while her mother, Taube, survived Halbstadt (Gross Rosen) and Auschwitz. In an article in CounterPunch, Roy wrote that while her mother was confined in the Lodz ghetto she endeavoured to hide children destined for deportation to the Nazi extermination camps, but they were seized and despatched to Auschwitz.
Roy earned an Ed.D. with a specialization in International Development from Harvard University's Graduate School of Education in 1988.[citation needed]
Having visited Israel many times when she was growing up, she added, "[i]t was perhaps inevitable that I would follow a path that would lead me to the Arab-Israeli issue", providing several examples of parallels between Nazi treatment of Jews "in the 1930s, before the ghettos and death camps", and Israeli soldiers' treatment of Palestinians which, in her opinion, "were absolutely equivalent in principle, intent, and impact: to humiliate and dehumanize."
She further developed these themes in the 2008 Edward Said Memorial Lecture at the University of Adelaide, in which she said:
"Israel's occupation of the Palestinians is not the moral equivalent of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. It does not have to be. The fact that it is not in no way tempers the brutality of the repression, which has become frighteningly normal. 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."