Roy had been invited by Center for American and Jewish Studies founding director Marc H. Ellis to connect her family's experience in the Holocaust to her academic work on the Palestinian people.
[4] Roy explained that both her parents had survived the Holocaust, but that 100 members of her extended family, who had resided in the Jewish shtetls of Poland, had been killed.
Her father, Abraham Rój [Wikidata], was one of the seven known survivors of the Chelmno extermination camp, while her mother, Taube, survived Halbstadt (Gross Rosen) and Auschwitz.
[5][6][7] In an article in CounterPunch, Roy wrote that while her mother was confined in the Lodz ghetto she endeavoured to hide children destined for deportation to the Nazi extermination camps, but they were seized and despatched to Auschwitz.
[citation needed] Having visited Israel many times when she was growing up, she added, "[i]t was perhaps inevitable that I would follow a path that would lead me to the Arab-Israeli issue", providing several examples of parallels between Nazi treatment of Jews "in the 1930s, before the ghettos and death camps", and Israeli soldiers' treatment of Palestinians which, in her opinion, "were absolutely equivalent in principle, intent, and impact: to humiliate and dehumanize.
"[9] She further developed these themes in the 2008 Edward Said Memorial Lecture at the University of Adelaide, in which she said: "Israel's occupation of the Palestinians is not the moral equivalent of the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
"[10]Roy spent time doing dissertation fieldwork in Israel and in the Gaza Strip as a research assistant to the third West Bank Data Base Project.
[11] She was part of a non-official survey led by Meron Benvenisti, whose goal was to examine the impact of Israel's national unity coalition government on the West Bank and to a lesser extent the Gaza Strip.