Dorothy Zellner Quotes

When I was in the south in the 60s, the white people didn’t really curse you out, they just tried to kill you.

there has been interest on the part of black intellectuals. I know that several trips to the West Bank (you can’t go to Gaza) have taken place with leading black intellectuals who have decided to make common cause with this issue...It’s like Archbishop Tutu– when he goes to the West Bank and he looks around at what’s happening and says, This is worse than apartheid, well he speaks with the kind of moral leadership that no one can dispute.

I have yet to meet one single human being who has been to Israel and Palestine, who has not had their entire life changed, and they can call you all kinds of names, anti-Semite and self-hating Jews. But we have actually seen the Israeli policies and in some cases we have been the victims of them. We have seen Palestinians herded like cattle through these institutionalized checkpoints, that are like mini prisons. I am totally confident that people understanding the facts will change their behavior.

what’s going on in the campuses is truly amazing to me. I think I realized that we were going to win when the first Open Hillel was created on campus [at Swarthmore last December]. Because this is a sea change: the Israeli government policy is built on relying on the Jews in the Diaspora to be either completely convinced of the efficacy of the Jewish state or else bludgeoned into supporting the Jewish state as it exists now...what these students did this was earthshaking because it means that they want to think. They don’t want anyone else to think for them anymore, and they know about the abuse they will get, and they are willing to take the abuse, it’s not going to come as a shock to them.

BDS [Boycott Divestment Sanctions] is turning out to be very very strong, and obviously successful, more successful than we even thought...It’s not only in dollars and cents, but in the consciousness. The consciousness about BDS is totally different from two years ago. It’s now considered to be a serious way for people to register their feelings about the occupation.

somehow or other we will all have to follow Miss Baker’s teaching: to look deeply, beyond the horror of the moment and our particular loyalties. Because once we understand that there are root causes, we will be able to make effective efforts to change them.

what, in my opinion, is the “root cause” of all the death and destruction in the Middle East? It isn’t Hamas, it isn’t who sent the rockets first, who killed which teenager first, and it isn’t who broke which ceasefire first. The underlying cause flows from the injustice of one group controlling the lives and future of another group. As long as Israel occupies Palestine, and as long as Palestinians resist (which, according to International human rights law, they have the right to do), confrontations and death will result. The root cause is the occupation, which itself flows from the previous dispossession of Palestinians from the land they inhabited for generations.

In 1969, Ella Baker, SNCC’s great mentor, pointed us in the direction of meaningful action when she said, “In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed.” This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning – getting down to and understanding the root cause. Baker continued, “It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.”

For me, the events in Ferguson and the events halfway around the world are linked. I am not saying they are the same. I am not even saying there are many parallels, but there are some similar lessons.

What SNCC taught me was that I needed to act in my own community. It took me some time to put all of this together but finally, eleven years ago, I went to Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza for the first time. Based on what I saw with my own eyes and the anguish I felt in my own heart I became a Jewish activist against Israeli governmental policies of injustice and inequality.

What propelled me into the civil rights movement in the first place as a young woman was the exhortation I had received from my secular Jewish progressive parents: that it is unethical to stand idly by while people are oppressed and suffering.

I take issue with the Jewish Currents editorial, “Supporting the Black Lives Matter Platform, Its Slander of Israel Notwithstanding” (Autumn, 2016), in which the magazine unfortunately joined the pack of the hands-in-the-air-I’m–shocked-and-horrified Zionist groups that condemned the Movement for Black Lives — a very large coalition of which Black Lives Matter is one organization — for using the words “genocide” and “apartheid” in relation to Israel’s policies toward the Palestinian people...Echoing Dr. Joy James, if the situation of the Palestinians under Israeli control is not genocide, what is it?

As a veteran of the 1960s civil rights movement, I hope this year's Martin Luther King Day will be more than the usual constant repetition of his “I have a dream” speech. This has flattened the very essence of the movement, which was the vastness and the vibrancy of hundreds of thousands of “ordinary” people who wouldn’t and couldn’t stand for any more indignities and any more insults. I know because I was in Georgia, Virginia and Mississippi as a staffer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; I spent two years in Atlanta. This great movement of African-American civilians and their white allies lacked an army or air force, yet we imprinted our freedom demands on the national consciousness for the following decades and presumably, for decades to come...It may surprise people to know that Palestinians read Dr. King's words and call his name and study the American civil rights movement, among other histories of other peoples, for ways to bring to the attention of the world the fact that little by little, their land is disappearing along with their rights.