User:John Z/drafts/Sara Roy

Sara Roy is a Research Associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. She lived in the Gaza Strip for several years in the 1980s Her research and over 100 publications on Palestinian politics and economics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict focus on the economy of the Gaza and more recently on the Palestinian Islamic movement. 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" She serves on the Advisory Boards of American Near East Refugee Aid and the Center for American and Jewish Studies at Baylor University.

In a Holocaust Remembrance lecture at Baylor that has been reprinted several times she said that "the Holocaust has been the defining feature of my life." Both her parents survived the Holocaust, which killed over 100 members of her extended family from the Jewish shtetls of Poland. Her father, Abraham was one of the two known survivors of the Chelmno extermination camp, while her mother Taube survived Halbstadt(Gross Rosen) and Auschwitz. Having visited Israel many times when she was growing up, she writes "It was perhaps inevitable that I would follow a path that would lead me to the Arab- Israeli issue."

Roy has published commentary on such topics as "Yes, You Can Work with Hamas".

Controversies
She has opposed HR 3007? supported by Daniel Pipes.

Roy drew public attention when a book review she had written of Mathew Levitt's book Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad was rejected by Tufts University’s Fletcher Forum on World Affairs. After the editor in chief accepted the piece, he wrote Roy that the article had been reviewed for "objectivity," and that "all reviewers found the piece one-sided". He then rejected it, but apologized "for the way in which this process was carried out." Middle East Policy later published the review with Roy's note on the affair which described the rejection as a "blatant... case of censorship."

Roy was in the spotlight again when she co-wrote an op-ed in The Boston Globe in which she wrote "although Gaza daily requires 680,000 tons of flour to feed its population, Israel had cut this to 90 tons per day by November 2007, a reduction of 99 percent." The article was criticized for the error in arithmetic "if Gaza has a population of 1.5 million, as the authors also note, then 680,000 tons of flour a day comes out to almost half a ton of flour per Gazan, per day." The Boston Globe ran a correction in which it said that Gaza requires 680,000 pounds, not tons, of flour daily.

A speech by Roy at the University of Virginia in April 2008 drew approximately 10 protestors, according to a local newspaper.

Praise and Criticism
Phyllis Chesler called Roy one of "the most savage critics—of America and Israel."

Sonia Nettnin calls Roy "one of the foremost scholars on the economy in Gaza."Commenting on Roy's The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development Meron Benvenisti, former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem states that "Sara Roy's pioneering research...gives the lie to pretenses that Gaza's conditions suddenly arose out of thin air "The world`s leading authority on the Gaza Strip"

Publications

 * The Gaza Strip Survey (1986)
 * The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development (1995, 2001)
 * The Economics of Middle East Peace: A Reassessment (1999, editor)
 * Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (London: Pluto Press, 2007)
 * Between Extremism and Civism: Political Islam in Palestine (Princeton University Press, forthcoming)