There are several possible responses to this idea:

1)      Every person’s knowledge about anything is fundamentally incomplete. Asking people to wait until they know everything there is to know is asking them to wait forever.

2)      Further, people usually have a particular type of knowledge in mind when they suggest that your knowledge is lacking, like ‘academic knowledge’ or what I’ve heard commonly referred to by Israelis as the ‘knowledge of the reality in Israel’ or something like that. Rather than advocating solidarity between different knowledges and trying to explain the gaps between them, this approach seeks to invalidate some knowledges at the expense of others.

3)      Acting and speaking on what we know (and think we know) is not the end but rather the beginning of discussion and the formation of more knowledge. If a person remains idle and at rest, then they are more susceptible to being receptacles of other more powerful people’s assumptions rather than their own. I feel that one of the very first essential action for a person or community to empower themselves is to take upon themselves the task of analyzing their world and producing knowledge about it. I believe that activist-minded people, people who take upon themselves the responsibility to see the world with their own eyes, should always be unsatisfied with what they know while at the same time never exchanging dissatisfaction with insecurity.

4)      Echoes are powerful things. One of the experience that radicalized me the most was the many similarities I noticed in my studies between different cases of repression of dissent and the criminalization of different communities in countries thousands of miles from each other. As one of my Palestinian friends once told me, “When I talk to a guy from the Zapatistas talking about the army taking their land, I understand him, he doesn’t have to explain it to me.” He did not mean that there were not differences between the Mexican government’s war against Mexican peasants or that these differences didn’t need to be explained in endless detail in order to suggest any possibilities for resistance, but rather that there is an essential pattern, i.e. state sanctioned dispossession of indigenous peoples, that he recognized. Just because this recognition should be a springboard to more discussion and mutual education does not mean that it cannot be a springboard for solidarity and action. For example, most Americans have inherited some (somewhat diluted) version of the discourse of the American Civil Rights movement, which essentially means that most Americans bristle when they recognize what they perceive to be racist language (“They’re all animals anyway,” “X people are much more violent that Y people,” or “I hate Z people”). If Americans hear speech that they recognize as what would be considered “racist” in the US, I don’t believe that they should ignore this recognition because “they lack the knowledge” to “have an informed opinion.” They should respectfully engage people who speak this way or are from that part of the world and offer their perspective. It may be that the speech they heard may have been something totally different, or it may be exactly what they thought it was. But people must act on these recognitions if any change is to be brought about.

5)      The exception exposes the rule. There are many, many theories of knowledge running around, but I am heavily influence by the anthropological approach to knowing: that the “exceptions” of the world have the potential to question our very foundational assumptions by suggesting new rules, new patterns that are fundamentally incompatible with what we previously thought.

It is due to this last point especially that I deeply appreciate articles like Gideon Levy’s “Mohammed Omer: ‘Why Did They Treat Me Like That?”

Palestinian workers line up before entering the Erez Industrial Zone in the Gaza Strip, from Btselem.org

The article focuses on one “exceptional case”: Once upon a time, a Palestinian was endowed by the Israeli occupation bureaucracy with the mystical ability to cross the border between Gaza and the world. He is exceptional in every way; a man moved by the oppression he has experienced growing up in Gaza to train himself as a grassroots journalist and photographer, whose work earned him a prize from a British journalists’ association. His case only grew in its exceptional nature: his border crossing required the intervention of diplomats, negotiations among powerful agencies, and a taxi running on cooking oil.

Taken just on its own terms, Mohammed Omer’s departure describes a great deal of what the occupation means for many other people, and this both despite and because of its exceptional nature. The unique nature of the case made the entire Israeli apparatus that valiantly protected Gaza’s borders exceptional as well.

But the most instructive aspect of this case is also its most outrageous. How does the occupation apparatus respond to a Palestinian who has been granted exceptional rights of movement and exceptional recognition not only as a human being but as a respected journalist? What does it do when he tries to return?

“The policewoman at the border crossing asked him where he was headed and he said “Gaza,” in English. “That’s the place that causes problems,” she said. “I didn’t argue with her,” says Omer. A few seconds later she said he had no permit and told him to wait. After over an hour the authorities called him.

Over the phone from his room in the hospital, he describes what happened; it is evident that he has been traumatized. The security people took apart all his belongings, asked where the prize money was, and couldn’t understand why he was returning to Gaza. “Mohammed, are you crazy?” asked one. “Why did you leave Paris? Did you leave Paris to return to Gaza? You could have lived better in Paris. You are choosing to suffer.” Omer replied that he has chosen to document suffering, not to suffer.

Then he was forced to strip. He agreed to take everything off except his underpants, but says the interrogator pulled them off by force, pressing a gun to his body. He will never forget that humiliation. He broke into tears, fell onto the floor, partly unconscious, and began to vomit. He says the security guards hurt him, putting a foot on his neck and sticking their hands under his eyes and behind his ears. “I felt like an African under apartheid,” he explains. Afterward he asked his interrogator: “Why are you treating me like this?” The reply was: “Wait, you haven’t seen anything yet.” He says he was dragged on the floor of the terminal, while a female traveler shouted at the security guards: “Why are you doing that to him? Leave him alone!”"

This seems to me to be a “cutting down to size,” a ritual of humiliation and torture comprising a violent response to the contradiction between the man’s exceptional case and the fact that he is Palestinian, and holds a well-defined, subordinated ‘place.’ It seems that the border policemen were teaching the man what ‘being Palestinian means,’ re-inducting him into the world as a normal Palestinian under their supervision, rather than an exceptional one which calls their authority into question. Palestinians are subordinated, humiliated, immobile, and silent, not globe-hopping journalists who receive prizes.

The article ends with a flourish of banality: the cinder-block words of the occupation bureaucracy:

Shin Bet Security Service: “The search was done by a policeman with the assistance of security agents, according to the procedures usually used at the border crossings. It should be stressed that during the body search, the person in question received decent treatment and no extraordinary measures were taken against him. After the body search, a search was conducted of his belongings, after which the person in question lost his balance and fell for some unknown reason. Paramedics were called to the scene, as was an ambulance. He was taken for medical care to Jericho.”

“Israel Airports Authority (IAA), which is in charge of the Allenby crossing: “In response to your request to look into the incident at the bridge, a comprehensive investigation was launched. It emerges that the entry of Mr. Mohammed Omer was not coordinated with the relevant authorities at the crossing. Mr. Omer was examined by the members of the state security services working at the crossing, according to proper procedure and to the laws of the State of Israel. The security check to which you refer does not fall within the bounds of responsibility of the IAA, which operates the crossing.”

These descriptions try to act like checkpoints for the mind. They change from pathetic to outrageous when one finds out that all kinds of people find them compelling. Regardless of whatever gaps any number of people might see between the “laws of the state of Israel” and what the security forces did to Mohammed Omer, this case suggests a routine more powerful and relevant than written law. It suggests a system of values and practices that thrives on the gray areas, that feeds on the gaping holes in the ‘law’ of the occupation, that multiplies on contradictory mandates, laws and institutions so as to carve out a space for lawlessness made legal. The article presents a stratigraphy of this fungus of improvised “justice,” a pattern that we can ’sound’ against other injustices and other times and see if an echo comes back.

Nothing exceptional happened, they say. Order is restored, has in fact never been violated. Everything has been made normal by the security services. The article is vital because it exposes the savagery of this order, this normality, and challenges us to do everything we can to prevent its ‘restoration.’ The article gives us some knowledge of the injustice of normality in this situation, a knowledge that a violation of a norm based on violence is a crime worth committing.

Mohammed Omer’s news site can be found at rafahtoday.org.