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POLICIES OF DENIAL  
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Sara Roy, interviewed by Max Nelson
January 3, 2026
The New York Review of Books
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_ “What I sense most powerfully from my friends in Gaza is a
feeling of abandonment. Quiet is not the absence of conflict nor is it
peace.” Plans for the “day after” in the Strip impose forms of
governance that exclude Palestinians as political agents _

Thousands of tents or homemade shelters line areas cleared of rubble
in the Palestinian territory , Photo: Omar Al-Qattaa / Agence
France-Presse (AFP) // France24

 

On November 14 the _Guardian_ reported
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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
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have been killed for crossing since a cease-fire went into effect this
past October. Last month CNN reported
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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_
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“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
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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. 

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 was how, as a Jew, I was
treated when I first lived in Gaza, which I’ve written about in
these pages
[[link removed]]. 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 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_
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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.

_[SARA ROY is an associate of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at
Harvard University. Her most recent book is __Unsilencing Gaza:
Reflections on Resistance_
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_MAX NELSON is on the editorial staff of The New York Review.]_

_This article is part of a regular series of conversations with the
Review’s contributors; read past entries __here_
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delivered to your inbox each week._

* Gaza
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* Palestine
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* Palestinians
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* West Bank
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* Israel
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* Gaza ceasefire
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* Donald Trump
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* UN
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* United Nations
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Hamas
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* apartheid
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* war crimes
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* Occupied Territories
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* IDF
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* Middle East studies
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* Palestine studies
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