Public Lecture - Dr Sara Roy - University of Melbourne - 8 October

PUBLIC LECTURE – DR SARA ROY

University of Melbourne – 8 October 2008

WHEN : Wednesday 8 October 2008 at 6.30 pm

WHERE : The University of Melbourne, Elisabeth Murdoch Theatre A, Elisabeth Murdoch Building (behind the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Swanston Street, Carlton)

TOPIC : Beyond Occupation: Examining the New Reality in Israel/Palestine

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Dr. Sara Roy is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University where she completed her doctoral studies in international development. Trained as a political economist, Dr. Roy has worked in the Gaza Strip and West Bank since 1985 conducting research primarily on the economic, social and political development of the Gaza Strip and on U.S. foreign aid to the region.

Roy has written extensively on the Palestinian economy, particularly in Gaza, and has documented its development over the last three decades. Her current research examines the social and economic sectors of the Palestinian Islamic movement and their relationship to Islamic political institutions, and the critical changes to the Islamic movement that have occurred over the last seven years. Her primary findings point to a restructuring and de?radicalization of the Islamist movement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip prior to the start of the second Palestinian uprising.

As a child of Holocaust survivors, Sara Roy is one of a number of Jews who has come to empathise with the Palestinians, and while living in Gaza, she “learned what it meant to have little control over one’s life.” Oslo, she writes, left Gazans with “a pervasive sense of loss, of a past diminished and a future marred, of achievements undermined and destroyed, of a society teetering between submission and revolt, a moving backward in time and thought.” She concludes that “in the end the only solution to the conflict lies in restoring what has been lost to both peoples—human dignity. And the only way to do that is to end the occupation and recreate the ordinary so that both Palestinians and Israelis can lead a normal life.”

As well as more than 100 publications dealing with Palestinian issues and the Palestinian?Israeli conflict, Dr. Roy is also the author of The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De?development (1995, 2001), now in its second edition with a third edition forthcoming; The Gaza Strip Survey (1986); and editor of The Economics of Middle East Peace: A Reassessment (1999). Her most recent book is Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian?Israeli Conflict (London: Pluto Press, 2007) and she is completing Between Extremism and Civism: Political Islam in Palestine (Princeton University Press, forthcoming).

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PUBLIC LECTURE - ABSTRACT

In the last eight years, the transformations in land, labor, economy, and demography in Israel and the Occupied Territories have been stunning. Palestinians have suffered losses not seen since the beginning of Israeli occupation in 1967, and arguably, since the losses of 1948. The current context has many dimensions but is defined primarily by Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian lands, perhaps most vividly expressed in the widespread expansion of Israeli settlements, the isolation of the West Bank and Gaza, the internal cantonisation of the West Bank and the bureaucratization of Israeli control. The current context is also defined by rapid socioeconomic decline, the total fragmentation of the geographical base of the Palestinian economy, the humanitarianisation of the Palestinian people, and the destruction of political life. The intensification and institutionalization of these and other conditions have led to some critical paradigmatic shifts in the way the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is conceptualized, understood and addressed.

The presentation will examine these paradigmatic shifts at the political, social and economic levels and argue that they collectively undermine the possibility of achieving a meaningful and politically and economically sustainable resolution of the conflict. In the absence of immediate redress in which the international donor community has a vital role to play, the transformations described will preclude any viable outcome for years if not decades to come.

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BOOK SIGNING : Dr Roy’s latest book Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict can be purchased and signed by her after the lecture in the foyer at the Melbourne University Bookroom stand.

Sponsored by Asia Institute • University of Melbourne • Australians for Palestine • Women for Palestine

www.australiansforpalestine.com

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http://events.unimelb.edu.au/event/5262/

http://www.asiainstitute.unimelb.edu.au/docs/20081008_SARA_ROY-Lecture.pdf