[NOTE: This lecture is drawn from a longer research work that will be published (with full citations) as a new introduction to the third edition of her book The Gaza Strip: the Political Economy of De-development forthcoming from the Institute for Palestine Studies]
Dr. Sara Roy:
I would like to begin by thanking the Board of Directors of the Jerusalem Fund and its Chairman, Dr. Subhi Ali, and the Executive Director of The Palestine Center, Yousef Munayyer, for inviting me to deliver the Edward Said Memorial Lecture. I am deeply honored.
Edward and I would always speak about Gaza, in fact every time we met. He felt a profound connection to the place and to the people that seemed to be a permanent part of him. Edward had great compassion and great respect for Gaza’s people. He embraced their suffering and took pride in their courage, in the dignified way they continued to move forward. Yet he feared one thing perhaps most of all: the separation and isolation that now engulfs Gaza and threatens, if it hasn’t already, to sever the Palestinians there from Palestinians elsewhere, forcing them, in the words of Hannah Arendt, to “live outside the common world,” deprived of profession and of citizenship, “without a deed by which to identify or specify [themselves].”
Edward raged against the division of his people and against the kind of loss that such division could bring: disunity, abandonment, irrelevance. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues that the fundamental deprivation of human rights is expressed first and most powerfully in "the deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective. Something much more fundamental than freedom and justice... is at stake when belonging to the community into which one is born is no longer a matter of course and not belonging no longer a matter of choice..." "This extremity and nothing else," she writes, "is the situation of people deprived of human rights. They are deprived not of the right to freedom but of the right to action." "Over the last 45 years Gaza’s trajectory has been striking; from a territory economically integrated into, and deeply dependent upon, Israel and deeply tied to the West Bank, to an area largely marginalized from Israel and the West Bank, an isolated (and disposable) enclave - subject to consistent military attacks - with which Israel and the West Bank have fewer formal economic or political ties than they once did. And from a captive economy restricted to fluctuating levels of growth (at best) but still possessed of the capacity to produce and innovate (within limitations), to an economy increasingly deprived of that capacity, characterized by unprecedented levels of unemployment and impoverishment, with three-quarters of its population needing humanitarian assistance. These damaging transformations among others I shall discuss are becoming increasingly institutionalized and permanent, shaping a future that is both partial and disfigured. What is happening to Gaza is, in my view, catastrophic; it is also deliberate, considered and purposeful.
This lecture will address some of the destructive policies and measures imposed on the Gaza Strip and their economic and social impact. I argue that as a result of these policies, Gaza is being rendered unviable and by that I mean dispossessed of the capacity for sustainable economic growth and development on the one hand, and increasingly incapable of effecting social change on the other.
Setting the Stage: Some Key Contextual Transformations
I would like to begin by briefly addressing some key contextual transformations or paradigm shifts in the way Gaza specifically and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict generally is understood. These contextual transformations, which I have written about in great detail elsewhere, provide an important backdrop to this discussion.
http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/36415/pid/897
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