Palestine Is Not a Drawing Board: Defacing the Street Art on the Israeli Separation Wall

Abstract

Unraveling the entanglements of fetish and secrecy bound up in the graffiti on the Palestinian face of the Israeli Separation Wall, this article analyzes the proliferation of defacements of the Australian street artist LushSux’s meme-graffiti on that wall in Bethlehem. In visually tracing and analyzing these successive moments of defacement, this article ethnographically captures a popular performance of collective Palestinian sovereignty within the borderlands of the Israeli Separation Wall. Celebrating defacement’s generative power to create a new face, this article demonstrates how defacement was an assertive act of unmasking the raw power of Israel’s colonial project.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Alejandro Paz and Atiqa Hachimi at the University of Toronto Scarborough, who invited me to present an early draft of this article at their “Digital Israel/Palestine” Symposium in 2019. There I received invaluable comments from Amahl Bishara, Ala Alazzeh, Diane Riskedahl, Donna Young, and Marianna Reis, which I am deeply thankful for. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewer for his/her insightful comments, and to Paul Hockings for his editorial guidance. Finally, I am indebted to all my dear friends and family in Bethlehem, but especially Jaclynn Ashly, a certain U.S. defacer, and one Hotel neighbor in particular, who all helped in the unraveling of secrets and the telling of this story in all its complexities. Of course, any mistakes in this retelling of defacing events are entirely mine, and mine alone.

Notes

1 As cited in Marco Proserpio’s (2018) film, The Man Who Stole Banksy.

2 The removal and subsequent sale of “Soldier Frisking a Donkey” is the subject of Marco Proserpio’s documentary film, The Man Who Stole Banksy (2018).

3 See also Ashly (2017), “Palestinians hit back at graffiti tourists,” for another account of the defacement of Lush’s murals.

4 As quoted on the Walled-off Hotel “Wall Mart” webpage, http://walledoffhotel.com/shop.html

5 Some Palestinians even levy the charge of “normalization” in their criticism of the Walled-off Hotel, as they believe the Hotel was actually established in collaboration with Israel. This is because when the Hotel was constructed, a third floor was built on top of the existing two-floor building, to house what is now the Hotel’s $1,000 a night “Presidential Suite.” Neighbors of the Hotel noted during interviews that such expansive local construction in the area surrounding the Wall is strictly forbidden by the Israeli military. These people stated that the Israeli military actively prevents the construction and maintenance of surrounding buildings from exceeding the height of the Separation Wall. Neighbors also noted that during the Hotel’s construction, Israeli military jeeps routinely watched over the construction site. This had led critics to conclude that the Walled-off Hotel must have obtained special permission from Israel and the Israeli military to establish their Hotel, to transport valuable art into Bethlehem via Israel and to construct a third floor that exceeds the height of the Wall. These suspicions of collaboration between Israel and the Walled-off Hotel arise from the notion that Israel has a vested interest in allowing such a space to exist, and that the Hotel thereby helps to normalize the terms of the Occupation.

6 The story of the old Palestinian man who confronted Banksy and told him to “go home” is infamous in Bethlehem, much like Banksy himself. The story is thoroughly recounted in Amahl Bishara’s (2017a) “Mobilizing Resistance: Israel’s Racist Walls of Separation.”

7 In reaction to the Alt-Right’s use of the Triple Parentheses, many Jews now appropriate this symbol in their online usernames and bios, to performatively recuperate its meaning as a symbol of pride in their Jewish identity.

8 In fact, the defacing message was first inspired by a Palestinian living in Ramallah, whom the activist-defacer conversed with on Twitter.

9 Brief contextualization of “Pewdiepie” helps elucidate Lush’s metalanguage of white supremacy. “Pewdiepie” is the online alias of Felix Kjellberg, a popular Swedish YouTuber who has been known to toy ambiguously with Nazi imagery and has made statements and videos that are blatantly anti-semitic.

10 Despite the fact that the initial defacing message was written in Arabic, Lush’s accusations reveal the depths of his anti-semitism. Lush was aware of the growing local resistance to his murals, but chose instead to garner support online by inciting and appealing to anti-Israel sentiments.

11 My use of the verb “sneak” to describe Israeli civilians who could possibly have defaced Lush’s work is deliberate. While technically, it is permissible for Israeli civilians to visit the Walled-off Hotel because it is located in an area classified as “Area A” (under full Israeli control), visiting requires that Israeli civilians cross areas and traverse checkpoints heavily signposted with bright red warning signs from their government, advising them not to enter. Some Israeli civilians disregard such warnings and visit the Hotel, despite the possibility that they could face repercussions if caught by the Israeli Military or Border Police. However, what is worth noting here is that the Hotel actively invites Israelis to visit it in Bethlehem. Hotel staff even claim the Hotel has opened a new “channel” between the two communities, presenting a “rare space where Israelis can visit and taste Palestinian reality” (Cook 2018). However, such arguments ignore the fact that Israelis are being invited into the Occupied West Bank at Banksy’s behest, to a Hotel predicated on commodification and conflict tourism. Banksy’s “invitation” to Israeli civilians fails to take into consideration the sentiments of Bethlehem’s local community and the fact that the Hotel is located in a borderland and within a colonial frontier that is constantly occupied by Israeli soldiers. All too often, Banksy’s politics are limited, in their failure to recognize the power differential at play between Israelis and Palestinians.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Connie Gagliardi

Connie Gagliardi is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her research explores the crafting and cultural production of Byzantine iconography in contemporary Palestine, focusing on the locally-made Byzantine icon as an ethnographic object and site of creative poiesis. She argues that the locally made Byzantine icon performs its signification dynamically upon the fractured Palestinian landscape. Her research conjoins novel approaches to phenomenology, material culture, and theology, highlighting the interplay between image-object, human and social context. E-mail: [email protected]