One need not defend Hamas to recognize that the people of Gaza are living in unacceptable squalor. Yet as we have demonstrated, the United States has not merely been indifferent to the crisis in Gaza, but played an active, significant, and thoroughly bipartisan role in degrading the conditions. The Strip is still that millstone that Edward Said warned Yitzhak Rabin wanted to drop from his neck, a place that no one wants—except the Palestinian people. Yet, as many have noted, the blockade of Gaza, now in its fourteenth year, has turned the Strip into the world’s largest open-air prison.
