Sara Roy
London Review of Books
1 January 2009
“Israel’s siege of Gaza began on 5 November, the day after an Israeli attack inside the strip, no doubt designed finally to undermine the truce between Israel and Hamas established last June. . . .
“Israel’s siege has two fundamental goals. One is to ensure that the Palestinians there are seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political identity and therefore can have no political claims. The second is to foist Gaza onto Egypt. That is why the Israelis tolerate the hundreds of tunnels between Gaza and Egypt around which an informal but increasingly regulated commercial sector has begun to form. . . .
“On 5 November the Israeli government sealed all the ways into and out of Gaza. . . .”
Read it all. Sara Roy teaches at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and is the author of Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. Ned Sublette sent this article out on his mailing list.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
The Palestinians are just another group of people in the way.
I wish Edward Said were still alive. His commentary is so needed at this time.
Hi Hattie – well there’s Dennis Kucinich and Keith Ellison, right there in Congress, at least! I really don’t understand why the majority of Democrats think they have to support Israel (beyond the need to have someone to attack the ME with, I suppose). Secretly I think it’s antisemitism in which they indulge privately while “making up for it” by supporting Israel. (I realize this is an eccentric analysis, but … they’re eccentric people, what can I say.)
Adelante, are you sure I shouldn’t publish your comment? It may be useful to others, too. You are doing a PhD at a place that has no TAships? Amazing. You need a dissertation fellowship for sure: they may have some themselves but there’s Fulbright (write in the Caribbean), AAUW, etc. Are you saying you will never need a “real” academic job? If that’s the case you can have fun, true fun, I would really check out places like U of the West Indies. And you might conceivably get a real job anyway. I could say more. Stay in touch.