THE WEST BANK WALL: GRAFFITI RELANDSCAPING INTO A

CULTURAL RESISTANCE ART WALL


ABSTRACT




‘Maybe it seems preposterous that art can change the world, but it can give a voice to
silenced and oppressed citizens on the dark side of any wall’ (Ron English, cited in Parry,
2010)

Following the Berlin Wall fall and the end of South African apartheid in the 1990s,
the global political discourse of open borders seemed to prevail over these enclosure
systems belonging to a painful historical memory. Ironically, in our globalized world, recent
international history shows a revival of the physical demarcation of borders as a means of
territorial delimitation. Since 2000 a regain in border wall construction expresses the
political anxiety of our time. However, out of this dominant-dominated relationship,
resistance movements emerged on the very object of rejection – the wall – as the
reconquest of dispossession. More specifically, resistance is expressed through public

artistic creation, graffiti as a form of protest against the very essence of the wall. Expressing
itself on the materiality of the wall, it seizes the power of territoriality and relandscapes the
space. At the local level, the graffiti on this public wall echoes the reality of local people,
voicing a new subjectivity that was usually oppressed and marginalized by dominant forces
and political discourses. The dissensus, paradoxically visible on the rejected object and
claiming for its destruction, implies, on the one hand, an ephemeral temporality character
of the artistic creation. On the other hand, the seeming security purpose of the wall shifts
into an ephemeral everyday act of resistance support. As powerful as the symbolic presence
of the wall, Art resistance and its political message transcend their own wall space and are
exported across borders. Thus, the wall provokes and welcomes the encounter of local and
international artists, leading to the creation of a new Palestinian hybrid culture of
resistance. Graffiti expressed in this special wall and enshrined in this special segregationist
context is then a means of communication and reappropriation of space, identity, voice, and
view.
This essay argues that graffiti relandscaping provided the imaginary local
reappropriation of the space, voices, and view, and that by means of communication, a new
hybrid identity emerges: this process is transforming a segregationist security wall into
ephemeral support of an everyday act of resistance. However, this reappropriation is
challenged by the International Open-space gallery and its propension to colonize the local
suffering voices in a paradoxically post-colonial era.
To support this argument, the study is built in three parts, interacting with each other with
graffiti as the common thread. First, graffiti, in its spatial inking, imaginary relandscapes the
exclusive status quo (I). By means of communication, it promotes the re-appropriation and

the construction of a new hybrid cultural identity as a healing process (II). However, the
international character of the open space gallery tends to limit this process (III).

*

The idea of the Wall within the space: Resistance Art relandscaping
the imaginary exclusion

The segregationist idea of the wall

The materialization of borders marks a segregationist delimitation based on the
exclusion of the ‘Other’ designed as a threat to national security, which is legitimized by a
‘State Racism’ that lies in the very mechanisms of the biopower modern state (Foucault,
1976), or in this case, of the Israeli modern-state building. Since the 1990s, the upsurge of
this political anxiety in our globalized world is materialized by the ‘Wall around the West’
(Fields, 2010) for seeming security and negotiation purposes (Madsen, 2015 and Jones et al.,
2016). These purposes are expressed through the visibility and materiality of the walls. But
‘walls do not bring peace’ (Sterling, 2009, cited in Jones et al., 2016) as ‘walls project an
image of sovereign powers that nation-states cannot sustain’ (Brown, cited in Shalem and
Wolf, 2011). The Israeli human rights groups B’teslem and Bimkom demonstrated through

the comprehensive study ‘Under the Guise of Security: Routing the Separation Barrier to
enable Israeli Settlement Expansion in the West Bank’ that the security purpose of the wall
was in fact a political ruse for colonization (Parry, 2010). Indeed, this model of enclosure
disrupting the space’s serenity is used by dominant groups to reimagine their territorial
landscape through a harsh system of control over dominated populations (Fields, 2010 and
Larkin, 2014). The architectural element interrupting locals’ everyday life is used to protect
the status quo (Madsen, 2015) as it reinforces the legal conception of the right to property
(Locke 1648, cited in Fields, 2010) and the colonial civilizing mission ideology.

Echoing this idea, the construction of the West Bank Wall is initiated in 2002 at the
height of the 2 nd Intifada, as the product of the ‘ethnocratic’ Israeli state. Stretching over
700km in length and 18m high, the sharp barbed wire wall draws attention with its imposing
stature and distorts the landscape. Like a Gog-and-Magog that represents the political
failure memory of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the wall conquers and obstructs the view,
provoking the ‘death of the view’ and hope (Bitton, 2004, cited in Shalem and Wolf, 2011),
leading to the creation of ‘impassible spaces’ (Fields, 2010) through fragmented geography.
It is ironically characterized directly on the wall with inscriptions such as ‘Nothing to see
here!’ in At-tur Zeitim’s checkpoint. Banksy’s 2005 ‘living room’ piece of artwork is also an
attempt to represent this death of the view: by recreating a living room with a window
showing a landscape, the artist stresses the block to the world that the wall causes. Simone
Bitton (2004, cited in Shalem and Wolf, 2011) put it in a picture as a ‘burial’ of the land: the
wall hides and conceals the view and the local populations seeking protection (Bitton, 2004,
cited in Shalem and Wolf, 2011). The re-coverage of Banksy’s landscape by local artists can

be seen as means of ‘debeautifying’ but also as a means to represent this burial of the land.
In this sense, the wall recalls a segregationist character more than its alleged security
function as it spatially marks cultural and social differences as well as antagonisms and
resentments. It is characterized and transcripted into art directly on the wall: at the same
checkpoint, walls are painted and built on the wall to stress the segregationist barrier aspect
of the wall. Following the same idea, it challenges Palestinian territorial integrity. Indeed,
more than 80% of the wall is on Palestinian soil (Netti and Mansour, 2020), annexing 9,4% of
the West Bank (Jones et al., 2016) and thus, remapping the Palestinian-Israeli borders. For
instance, Ni’lin town used to cover 580 hectares and lost 25 hectares only to the wall which
40% was agricultural land. Today, the town covers only 73 hectares which means Ni’lin lost
about 87% of its land to Israel. From a very local voice, Mohammad Amira, a teacher from
this mentioned town, claims he lost 2,5 hectares of his farmland: ‘We see Israel expanding
colonies on our shrinking horizon. Built on Palestinian land, they become huge fortresses
that exploit our resources, trample our rights, and threaten our existence (…) for the
exclusive rights of Jewish settlers (…) It’s apartheid. It’s ethnic cleansing’ (Mohamad Amira,
interviewed and transcribed in Parry, 2010). These spoken words transcribe the colonial
violence and suffering of the situation local populations are living by the presence of the
wall and his annexion, the sense of injustice, and the frustration that emerge from. In this
sense, the wall can be seen as a monster, with an imposing posture of concrete blocks,
disrupting and devouring the space. In this idea, some graffiti are directly depicting
frightening and devouring creatures such as snakes or spiders in Bethlehem, to sarcastically
represent the Beast nature-like of the wall. A wall that devours everything in its path.

The wall is visible but also invisible: the materiality of the wall implies an invisible
side that reflects social and cultural differences, silence, antagonism, and resentment
(Shalem and Wolf, 2011). The dominant power landscapes and creates a social product, a
ghetto. Hence, the wall deports and creates hierarchy and exclusion by controlling and
preventing Palestinians from free movement across their territory and assessing hierarchical
status based on religion and ethnicity. In this sense, the wall symbolizes the disruption of
daily life on the West Bank ( Jones et al., 2016). For instance, Palestinians living in Jerusalem
are deprived of citizenship and are thus left without ‘the right to have right’ (Arendt, 1991)
provoking a loss of Palestinian national identity (Shalem and Wolf, 2011). This new artifact
of power constitutes a social order by communicating a new territorial order with a
mechanism of spatial discipline (Fields, 2010) governed by a sinuous line in the landscape.
‘Where wall comes, it creates dead areas’ (Jala, 2005, cited in Fields, 2010). It creates a
‘ghettoization’ phenomenon secluding, excluding, and imprisoning the local Palestinians
into marginalized spaces, i.e. enclaves and exclaves (Larkin, 2014). It is the implementation
of Foucauldian thought of State Racism, where the Israeli modern state marginalized the
Other to protect its population. The territorial marginalization of the Palestinian landscape
also reflects the modern conception of the prison, which disciplines individuals by
controlling their space and status as a matter of public policy (Foucault, 2002). In Abu Dis, an
artwork is representing two hands trying to distort to break the bars of a prison, to access
freedom, against a prison-like space denying their civic existence. It largely recalls the reality
of the situation: the creation of checkpoints, its long passages surrounded by barbed wire
and bars, recalls the prison in the collective imagination and causes both a distortion of
space, by refusing passage, and of time by lengthening waiting times at the border. The
stagnation of the situation of lawless premises, although reprimanded by international 1 and

national 2 institutions, proves the limits of international justice over national state-building
interests. Since the 1967 agreements, the successive Israeli governments encouraged the
establishment of illegal colonies on Palestinian soil. All the colonies within the West Bank
have been deemed illegal by International Law as going against Hague Convention, Geneva
Convention, and the 465 UN Council’s resolution. The annexation of the Palestinian soil by
the Wall aims in fact to protect those colonies by putting 80% of them on the west right side
of the wall (Parry, 2010). While the International Court of Justice reiterated these charges in
2004 with no results, the international incapacity to enforce Law is then translated into the
resistance of populations at the local level, expressed in particular through artistic practice.

Graffiti challenging the status quo

As in Cairo, ‘changes to physical spaces influence graffiti occurrence in conflict-
affected society, as a mechanism for protest and reclamation by artists and activists
following the erection of segregationist wall’
(Abaza, 2013, cited in Vogel et al., 2020).

Like with every other border barrier, the use of graffiti on the West Bank Wall is a
means of space claim (Madsen, 2015). To strategically contest this distortion over time and

1 The ‘wall is contrary to International Law’ (ICJ, 2004).
2 ‘Israel’s High Court challenged the legality of the Wall’, (Lynk, 2005).

space, the Israeli physical barrier becomes the world’s largest public canvas for the
expression of space belonging. ‘Politics is a battle about percible and sensible material’
(Ranciere, 2002, cited in Salih and Richter-Devroe, 2014). Indeed, the Wall becomes a non-
violent medium of protest (Netti and Mansour, 2020). Because the symbolic idea of the wall
reflects the critical role of the landscape in the exercise of power and domination, there is a
need for the local population to seize back the power of territoriality and relandscapes the
space. As a ‘new and innovative way to confront occupation’ (Halabi, 2000, cited in Vogel et
al., 2020), graffiti is exerted on the wall by artists for the marginalized to recapture the
space. Acting as the ‘broken window’ principle (Wilson and Kelling, 1982, cited Madsen
2015) but in reverse, the reiteration of graffiti on the wall aims for the local population to
transform an oppressive space into a resistance space voicing local suffering. This is an
everyday act of resistance challenging macro-politics and the status quo from the bottom.
Thus, graffiti are mainly located on very visible ‘hot spots’ as territorial claims: they are
mainly located next to checkpoints that express oppression through the imaginary prison
and the Israeli authority. ‘The Palestinian Mandela’ depicted by Marwan Barghouti at
Ramallah checkpoint reflects this modality: it is painted as a prisoner who has overcome his
oppressor reflecting the passage from a prison-like space to a space of resistance and
triumph (Shalem and Wolf, 2011). The ‘Palestinian Mandala’ recaptures and marks the
space to transform it through an act of resistance. The aim is to reclaim the local alternative
imaginary of belonging through a spatial confrontation challenging the status quo and
temporarily taking the upper hand (Madsen, 2015 and Salih and Richter-Devroe, 2014). The
re-appropriation of the space can be more clearly expressed through the direct
reappropriation of the view. As we already saw, Bansky’s previously evoked piece of Art is
expressing this idea. More local alternatives are also to be found: in Abu Dabis, an artwork

depicts two hands trying to open the wall as a way to re-open the landscape, to access the
view and so to freedom.

‘The battle against occupation has shifted from committees to media sites. The
images of the wall often speak louder than politician voices’ (Larkin, 2010, cited
in Larkin, 2014).
By the reappropriation of the space that reflects the reality of the everyday life of
the local population, graffiti expresses a ‘dissensus’ 3 in opposition to the Israeli ‘consensus’
(Salih and Richter-Devroe, 2014), challenging and contesting the status quo (Georgon, 2012,
cited in Vogel et al., 2020) of prevalent political winds (Madsen, 2015). Indeed, graffiti
represent the ideas and value of the artists opposing segregationist and imperialistic
practices of the Israeli State, displaying political and social demands using public space for it.
Simple ‘Apartheid’ local inscriptions are to be found everywhere on the wall to denunciate
Israeli policy, the word itself being powerful enough. International alternatives are also
expressed: ‘I come from Apartheid South Africa. Arriving in your land, the land of Palestine, I
am struck by similarities’: Sendmessage, a charitable organization, wrote 2009 Farid Esack
open letter along 2.6km on the wall for the world to ‘not readily forget’ (sendmessage,
2009, cite in Parry, 2010). This dominant work is at the same time, certainly, the most
emotionally powerful message reminding of historical Apartheid: the author Farid Esack, a
South African activist, anti-apartheid campaigner, and gender equality commissioner for
Nelson Mandela’s government, is challenging the Israeli discourse by recalling its own
memory of South African Apartheid. At the other time, the imposing character of the piece
3 Defined as ‘a division inserted in ‘common sense’: a dispute over what is given and about the frame within
which we see something as given’ (Salih and Richter-Devroe, 2014)

of work on the wall challenges the greatness and the dominant imposition of the latter. By
disrupting the aesthetic forms of the visualized with graffiti, the domination and the
political, social, and cultural imaginaries evidence of the wall are challenged. Therefore, the
artistic representation on the West Bank Wall is political in the sense it reworks the frame of
our perception of the established aesthetic regime imposed by Israeli dominance. Also, it
generates a new form of subjectivity through the expression of marginalized voices to
engage with the dark reality of their paradoxical everyday normalized life under occupation
(Salih and Richter-Devroe, 2014). Graffiti on the West Bank Wall then challenge the
spectators’ senses and aesthetics to engage with another reality. For instance, the
storytelling iconography aims to ridicule the power of the imposing Wall by creating a
dialogue with the barrier itself. Through these processes of reappropriation of the space and
expression of local marginalized voices that lie in the essence of political Art, graffiti on the
West Bank Wall relandscape the colonial fragmented geography induced by the Israeli
enclosure policy of the Wall. This is a process enshrined within an ongoing historical battle
confronting the Israeli dominant group and the local Palestinian, for each to impose its
vision.

The West Bank wall itself becomes the object of resistance demonstrations as it
represents the physical reality of the occupation and territorial order. It reflects the union of
everyday Art, through its location in the public domain, and International relations from the
bottom approach to peacebuilding, i.e. through the commune expression of local voices
(Vogel et al., 2020). The use of graffiti on the West Bank Wall is to be considered as a local
(Lederach, 1997, cited in Vogel et al., 2020) and aesthetic (Bleiker, 2001, cited in Vogel et al.,

2020) turn voicing the marginalized Palestinian to express their everyday life reality within a
lopsided geopolitical power relation. The aim is to denounce the wall within the wall itself,
which paradoxically implies an ephemeral temporality to the wall and to the Art of
resistance: to destroy the wall on which the artistic creation resides (e.g. ‘The Wall must
fall’, ‘Tear down the wall’). The ephemerality of the artwork is a necessary condition for it to
not validates the existence of the wall, but instead, for the graffiti to underline the negative
and destructive character of the wall. Therefore, the wall becomes a needed ephemeral
agent supporting claims for its destruction: the Art within the wall aims to underline its
intrusive character. The inscription ‘fragile’ in Ramallah, sticker-like, stresses the imported
nature of the wall and its imminent fall, reflecting in turn the very ephemeral temporality of
the wall (Shalem and Wolf, 2011). Yoaw Weiss’ ‘buythewall.com’ project in At-tur Zeitim’s
also characterized this temporality: parts of the walls are for sale on the internet as a future
souvenir to underline the necessarily ephemeral character of this wall whose aim is to be
destroyed. Characterized as a future souvenir, the project already questions the memory
afterward: which marks and scars will the wall left in the former space of existence?

**

The use of graffiti on the West Bank Wall can be seen as a platform for the marginalized
Palestinian to question the division the Wall implies and seeks to rebalance inequalities
caused by the Segregationist Israeli policy the Wall represents. Therefore, the Wall
recaptures the space and becomes a new and ephemeral platform to express and
communicate to the world the dissensus of local reality, in such a public way that it
recreates a local identity through global collective memory.

**

From segregationist purposes to a bridge of communication: the
(re)appropriation of a new cultural identity

‘ Graffiti has been shown to be a natural outlet for marginalized groups to express their
internal sense of Identity and injustice, a psychological embodiment of the writer’s self-
image and a source of self-empowerment’ (Hanauer, 1992, cited in Madsen, 2015).

A bridge of communication to internationally express a local reality

Graffiti expresses and makes resistance visible: it communicates from the ghetto to
the world. Written on a public wall and tolerated by local authorities makes it public Art,
theoretically accessible to everyone. Broadly, the action of writing on the wall as a form of
protest is enshrined within a history of architecture’s monumental inscription that aims to
be visible and that asks to be read (Shalem and Wolf, 2011). Written on the public West
Bank Wall, it has to be seen as public communication crying out the reality of the censored
(e.g. ‘Stop the racist Wall’, ‘ End the occupation’, to exist is to resist’, ‘ Free Palestine’ graffiti

in Abu Dis). Taking the form of an international language such as English or of well-known
storytelling through common visual memory, it communicates internationally a local reality
and discloses information about the specific local context (Voget et al., 2020). It is an
alternative means for non-violent communication (Alderman, cited in Madsen, 2015) of a
violent reality, a means of openness and of communication universally practiced and
recognized (Netti and Mansour, 2020) that directly confronts the reader within its own
space, overcoming barriers, by sending the political message of the local reality. Notably
using history, it ‘evokes thought and emotion in the viewer’ (Bolt and Paul, 1989, cited in
Madsen, 2015) transforming the segregationist wall into an international manifesto relating
a condition and a social malaise (Netti and Mansour, 2020) by taking place in the
international collective memory through storytelling (Shalem and Wolf, 2011).

To be well communicated and reach the masses, the storytelling has to be easily
understandable. For instance, much Palestinian reappropriation of Western international
dominant culture symbols can be observed on the wall: ‘La liberté menant le peuple’
(DeLacroix), or the ‘Liberty Statue’. These symbols speak of liberty, struggle, suffering, and
revolutions to a broad public. They are internationally known as synonyms of conquest to
liberty, and speak to the masses as a Palestinian claim for freedom. At the same time, they
express a local reality by reappropriating these symbols into Palestinian resistance claims of
the suffering: local Palestinians are struggling and fighting for their freedom and basic rights.
It creates an iconographic tense by associating times and spaces translated into the present
with new significance (Shalem and Wolf, 2011). For instance, Delacroix’s Famous French
Revolution painting for liberty against the oppressor is taken back by Vin7, a Palestinian

artist. Its own expression refers to the former painting by transforming ‘Marianne’ (French
republican and liberty symbol) with Palestinian emblems of struggle: rural jellabiya, keffiyeh,
and the Palestinian flag as the only colored element to stress the Palestinian struggle and
identity enshrined in a broader human struggle for freedom. It can also be read ‘Revolution
has started here… and will continue until…’: with the reappropriation of an international
symbol of liberty and the world’s most famous revolution, the graffiti becomes a means of
revolution, a revolutionary art, that communicates broadly. This association as a powerful
means of communication can also be translated through linguistics: in Qalanduja is written
‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’. The use of the famous phrase uttered by JFK associates the Berliners
who lived during the past Berlin Wall with the present struggles of the Palestinian living
within the West Bank. In the name of Fundamental Rights, it aims to make the wall speak
about a struggle that everyone should identify with, as JFK did for Berliners. At the same
time, it recalls the collective memory of the most-known segregation in the West: in At-tur
Zeitim checkpoint can be read ‘La dernière fois que j’ai vu une rue aussi vide et entourée de
barbelées c’était a Varsovie en 1942’ 4 ; and ‘Warsaw 1943, Compton 1992, Bethlehem 2005’
in Bethlehem. The wall speaks to the West creating a space of interaction between the
locals and abroad.

These associations of time and space are used to appeal to the West for the
appliance of International Human Rights and Western values by using Western collective
memory enshrined in Europe history and transposed in the Palestinian present. The
proximity between the locals and the interlocutor is then reinforced with the use of ‘we’

4 i.e. ‘Last time I saw such an empty street surrounded by barbed wire was in Warsaw in 1942’ (my own
translation).

and ‘us’, to stress the similitudes between and within the communities as one humankind. If
storytelling is used as a means of communication to claim belongings, it is also used as a
means of communication for denunciation. At the Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, a
statue of liberty is erected on the wall but turned into a statue of death. It surely aims to
denunciate the role of the United States in the suffering reality local populations are living
in. The denunciation is turned into quotes a few meters further on: ‘American Money, Israeli
Apartheid’.

The Palestinian Public Art Resistance shifts and reappropriates the meaning of a
separation wall into a myth of visual Palestinian rhetoric in which communicative function
shapes a new hybrid identity that aims to transcend inequalities and unite separation.

The Artscape: towards a new hybrid cultural identity

‘Graffiti in Palestine simultaneously affirmed community and resistance, debated tradition,
envisioning competing futures, indexed historical events and processes and inscribed
memory’ (Peteet, cited in Larkin, 2014).

The practice of graffiti on the West Bank wall is ‘a mode of response to trauma and
issues of identity negotiation’ for passive recipients of enforcement-based border policies
against the externally imposed structure to advocate for local (Hanauer, 1992, cited in

Madsen, 2015). The communicative function is shaping the identity of a positive message
that transcends inequalities and unites separation creating an imaginary visual Palestinian
rhetoric (Netti and Mansour, 2020). A cultural production emerged from a conflict and
struggles of a local population, creating a hybrid culture through public resistant Art as a
reaction to the loss of national identity the wall provoked. The use of graffiti, transforming
the landscape into an ‘Artscape’ (Jones et al., 2016) is then a cultural medium to manifest
resistance (Eldelman, 2011, cited in Netti and Mansour, 2020) giving a new function to the
wall (Larkin, 2014): the artistic upsurge on the wall reactivates a cultural production on the
significance and meanings of International limits and transforms the fence itself (Jones et
al., 2016).

Graffiti in conflict-affected societies aims for the individuals living inside ‘to affirm
their own identity and question the values of the society they were born into’ (Miller, 2002,
cited in Vogel et al., 2020). First, showing a silenced reality to the outside materializes the
existence of the oppressed community, reassuring them of their own existence (Jones et al.,
2016). Also, through this alternative subjective communication channel, the space but also
the identity become politicized. According to the particularity of the West Bank Wall space,
a subculture emerges, and they both change and respond to this surrounding environment
and the politics it implies (Ferrel, 2013; Bloch, 2019, cited in Vogel et al., 2020). The social
and urban space being a ‘privileged field of mythical meanings’ (Barthes, 1957, cited in
Achille and Maudilene, 2016), it is a sort of meaningful ‘Symbolic’ providing coordinates
through which humans understand their relationships (Lacan, cited in Wardle, 2016). The
‘cité’ being a ‘discourse (…) a real language’ (Barthes, 1971, cited in Achille and Maudilene,

2016), and the language being a ‘primary form of symbolization’ setting differential relations
(Lacan, cited in Wardle, 2016); urban space is a sort of ‘huge display boards of our cultural
representations and symbols that our societies seek to promote’ (Badarietti, 2002, cited in
Achille and Maudilene, 2016). The comprehension of reality emerges from the social use of
signs creating a network of meanings (Saussure, 1916, cited in Wardle, 2016) bound by
social norms (Lacan, cited in Wardle, 2016): therefore pro-Palestinian graffiti aims to convey
their ideology based on the expression of the dissensus regarding the segregationist space.
‘The challenge to [cultural] hegemony which subcultures represent is not issued directly by
them. Rather it is expressed obliquely, in style […] at the profoundly superficial level of
appearances: that is at the level of the signs’ (Hebdige, 1979, cited in Vogel et al., 2020).
Graffiti, in the common imagination, may seem at first sight futile and superficial. However,
especially in conflict-affected societies, it is in fact a symbolic form of representation: signs
are symbolic representations of the identity and values of the artists who seek to challenge
the cultural hegemony (Clark et al., 1976, cited in Vogel et al., 2020). And because
Palestinian graffiti makes the resistance visible against the Israeli dominant norm, it has to
be seen as a cultural product. A sort of window to their own identity and the representation
of the ideas of their community living in a particular area of a ghetto. Of the aim of
worldwide communication, a mix of icons and languages takes place, which may look like a
muddle at first sight, but through which a new ‘cultural hybridity’ (Larkin, 2014) emerges. To
target a broader audience about their suffering, international icons and languages are used,
mixed with local languages and representations, such as Arabic, Sumud, and Islamic Art. The
codes are mixed and switched reflecting cultural diversity and inclusion (Arthur, 2015, cited
in Vogel et al., 2020) with Western, Regional, and National heritage.

The use of English and personal pronouns as ‘we’ and ‘us’ is intended to appeal to
the international community but also reports marking a sense of closeness with the Western
community notably by echoing past dramas such as the Berlin separation or the Warsaw
ghettos, to show the reciprocity between the two communities: the two communities are
sharing the same suffering and so can identify to one another. For instance, ‘La Liberté
menant le peuple’ by Delacroix (1830) taken back by VIN7 on the West Bank Wall is a sort of
reappropriation that of course, on the one hand, allows speaking broadly, but also on the
other hand aims to show all social classes from all origins all over the world have been and
have to fight against the oppressor. In the imaginary myth, the French lower classes (even
though bourgeoisie in reality) fought against the oppressive power of the nobles and the
monarchy, as Palestinian are fighting against the Israeli oppression. Because French
Revolution is the glorious symbol of Western liberty, the International community should
recognize itself in the Palestinian struggles.

Moreover, it is a reciprocal process because the use of graffiti in the Arab world, in
general, has been largely influenced by the European revolutions (Netti and Mansour,
2020). From the use of graffiti after the 1917 Russian Revolution to the 1920s Mexican
Mural Movement, and the 1960s Youthful Movement, the West Bank Wall Street Art
reflects certain similarities such as the use of open space to be seen by broad masses, the
local struggle idea and the use of art as a key force in social revolution. In this sense, the
West Bank Wall public art is enshrined in an International tradition of Graffiti and
Revolutionary Art as an expression of suffering and a claim for human rights. At the same
time, it is also enshrined in more local culture: this tradition as a form of resistance to

dominant-subordinate relations through public Artistic practice was already pre-podernised
in early contemporary Arab culture. During the 1990s 1 st Intifada, graffiti was already used
to ‘take the walls’ to speak and to be heard reporting on the failure of the Israeli authority
to control activities and imagination on borders. Iconographic storytelling was to be easily
found (Peteet, 1996, cited in Netti and Mansour, 2020). Also, the Arab Spring has shown an
average use of street art on walls (Netti and Mansour, 2020). The West Bank Wall then
reflects a cultural production born in the struggles of displacement that express through
self-determination a repressed culture and history that conveys identity, memory, rights,
and aspiration of the local Palestinians for a better future. The resistance is expressed in the
very promotion of this Palestinian identity, enshrined in Arab Nationalism, and that rejects
Israel’s segregationist policies and colonialist legacies. Toward this history, Arabic and
religious elements are found within the iconographic storytelling of the wall. For instance, it
can be found in the representation of a woman who died during the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, with her soul pushed toward paradise. Obviously, it refers to Islamic art and the
Muslim religion: the colorimetry from grey (as the representation of the oppression that led
to death) to white represents the passage to death which is a new life. This conventional
form of non-violent resistance recalls Sumud Palestinian cultural values through
steadfastness, rootedness, and resilience expressed through the resistance by existence: ‘To
exist is to resist’ is written at different places on the wall. Also, the common pictural
representation of sabr’, a cactus, expresses the ability to survive in harsh conditions and re-
grow/re-live when cut. Usually, cactuses are all that remain once Israeli military forces
demolish buildings: it shows the boundaries of the local populations to their home (Parry,
2010) and so the pictural representation of the sabr on the wall is a powerful symbol.
Enshrined in this sort of Sumud resistance which emerged in 1967, it is establishing

alternative institutions of resistance. Through graffiti, the West Bank Wall is becoming one
of the expressions of Sumud, a ‘creative resistance’ (Hamdi, cited in Larkin, 2014).

Identity unification through cultural production is also a strategy for States and
National elites of Middle-East: it creates a powerful shared vocabulary to foster solidarity
and collective identity thus creating a common and mutually reinforcing imagery challenging
the established hegemonical narratives and creating alternative interpretations (Salih and
Richter-Devroe, 2014). It challenges the status quo and the existing elites’ cultural
hegemony by disrupting the established aesthetic hegemonic forms and visually highlighting
political, social, and cultural imaginaries and identities against the dominant ones. It is a
revolutionary artwork as it proposes a culture ‘outside of the old boundaries’ (Abu Bakr,
2014, cited in Salih and Richter-Devroe, 2014); a hybrid culture as a force of political change.
The construction of the commune identity finds itself in the Art and aesthetic expressing the
Palestinian dissensus. Broadly, the Palestinian cultural production echoed and shaped a
national identity struggling to survive (Salih and Richter-Devroe, 2014). In fact,
‘contemporary Palestinian Art reflects the hybrid identities of the artists and their ‘fluid’
positions in an interstitial space between their oriental matrix and the dominant culture of
the West’: the combination of Western, Palestinian, and Arabic cultures expressed within
the wall creates a hybrid identity leading to a sort of ‘dis-orientalism’ (Ankori, cited in Larkin,
2014). It creates a free zone in the mind leading to a decolonizing function and self-therapy
as a cultural struggle for emancipation. Indeed, the identity is shaped through an expression
of traumatic suffering that aims to heal. The expression of the suffering within the public
urban space is on the first hand a way to recognize, control, and explain the trauma to

overcome it through retroactive historicization; to have, on the second hand, an assumed
position of conscious commitment to recognizing the brutality of the ghettoization thus
rejecting the consensus. If trauma is impossible to represent (Freud, cited in Roth, 2012), it
needs a narrative. Constructing a counter-myth within a social space to deconstruct the
consensus, the local population has a strong desire to recognition of their suffering which
manifests in the public art practice within the wall. Some inscriptions are more personal
with the wall awakening personal memory. It relates to the need to publicly express an
intimate message. It is a sort of supranatural direct communication with the wall as a sacred
medium to transmit wishes (Shalom and Wolf, 2011). This type of inscription is easily
recognizable by being less stylized script. For instance, a Warsaw survivor wrote in
Bethlehem ‘ I want my ball back’. This kind of script seems more honest and personal,
claiming for a request in the same sacralized idea as the Jewish Western Wall is direct
support of communication transmitting wishes for the healing process. The practice of
graffiti is giving a voice to the trauma, thus both participating in a healing process and
reinforcing and creating a commune identity (Freud, cited in Roth, 2012). ‘Graffiti has been
shown to be a natural outlet for marginalized groups to express their internal sense of
identity and injustice, a “psychological embodiment” of the writer’s self-image and a source
of empowerment’ (Hanauer, 1992, cited in Madsen, 2015). By evoking thought and emotion
in the viewer and for itself, graffiti is therapeutic. The local community is looking for self-
validation by communicating their message in their ‘own little part of the world’ (Kramer,
1989, cited in Madsen, 2015). This is all the more striking because ‘their world’ is excluded.

***

Graffiti practice is a means of communication that led to the emergence of a hybrid culture
that oscillates between national, regional, and western representations, imaginaries, and
memories. It creates a sort of common community gathered around the trauma that needs
to be expressed to be healed and escaped. However, paradoxically, the mix between
International Western values and local representations tends to reduce the expression of
the local reality struggle by the International Artists’ works.

***

Questioning the public open space gallery

An imperialistic anti-colonial art?

Even though the wall is excluding the local community through ghettoization, the
movement remains international: it is the unity of a regional, Palestinian, and Western
movement. Through the ‘Global Palestine’ (Collins, 2011, cited in Larkin, 2014), the West
Bank Wall site became a site of international graffiti and solidarity. International artistic
expressions have enabled, on a certain scale, global movements of international solidarity.
For example, the 'stop Veolia' graffiti of the BDS campaign against Veolia has given them a
strong international voice (Larkin, 2014). Also, the 1 st Marches of Solidarity have been
organized on the Jerusalem side of the Abu Dis and al-‘Izariyya divide in 2003. This site of
conflict, as well as Bethlehem, became a touristic tour attraction, a museum, because of the

artistic work, especially of Western artists who made this space a place of artistic
‘pilgrimage’ (Larkin, 2014). Indeed, if the wall turns Palestine into ‘the world’s largest prison
(…), it also makes the ultimate activity holiday for graffiti writers’ (Banksy, 2005, cited in
Parry, 2010). In December 2007, Banksy organized the Santa’s Ghetto project in Bethlehem
with many world’s top street artists to create murals for the wall to become a visual
petition, an ephemeral forum to call for resistance, justice, and freedom. Media anonymous
artist star, Banksy has drawn a lot of international mediatic attention to the wall to bring
attention to the current oppressive and deadly situation Palestinian are living in. But at what
price? First, as it appeals to Western populations to come to visit the site by themselves, it
does not talk to a broad Western population for evident financial reasons: in a sense, it
recreates the questionability and problematics of broad access to museums. Then,
unsurprisingly, the less visited sites are the ones with Sumud traditional emblems (e.g. al-
kam shu’fat, al-‘izariyya) (Larkin, 2014). The Eurocentric artistic discourse is put forward in
the face of the world - through the notions of Human Rights, International peace (e.g. ‘Only
free man can negotiate’, ‘An eye for an Eye make the world blind’) – to the detriment of the
local discourse that reflects the reality of suffering and resistance largely based on
resilience, steadfastness, religion and rootedness (e.g. ‘We will be back one day’, ‘Fatah is
the key to Resistance’). While the local community tends to speak on an everyday concern
discourse, the International artists tend to support a global justice one. This duality
expresses a global language for resistance and solidarity that is at times at odds with the
local ones (Larkin, 2914). Is not it, ironically, a continuity of colonial mission ideology
artistically expressed through a sort of colonizing gallery? Are they colonizing the suffering
Palestinian space? International artists are providing their own critiques about border
policies through Human Rights, immigration, and globalization language while local

populations tend to express the suffering of the quality of their life through very local
dynamics (Madsen, 2015). These divergent approaches create tensions within the space,
between International artists, who are external to the conflict and speak on the behalf of
the local community. In a sense, the voices of the latter are squeezed out (Madsen, 2015)
and their sovereignty over the space is eroded (Larkin, 2014).

Beautifying horror

The paintings on the wall, especially by International artists, made it beautiful, and
so obstruct in a way the reality of the suffering, a rough, brutal, and dark reality of a ghetto
under occupation. If graffiti aimed to redefine the purpose of the wall from segregationist to
resistance space, the beautifying of the wall seems to divert the goal towards the creation
of a real museum. ‘We don’t want it beautiful, we hate this wall, go home’ (from an old
man Banksy spoke to in 2005, cited in Parry, 2010). Can we beautify a wall that is the
physical symbol of human repression? Is the West Bank Wall Public Art turning an
aggressive prison wall into a great work of Art? Graffiti on West Bank Wall, largely tolerated
by Palestinian authorities ceased to be seen as polluting and makes it Public Art rather than
graffiti. Indeed, Art influences the way those receiving it will relate to the landscape, and so
in the particular context of a segregationist wall, how they will relate to the political
situation. The artwork infringes upon the local meanings and can lead to normalization and
depoliticization. According to Salih and Richter-Devroe (2014), for Art to be political, it must

not ‘rely’ in the art’s explicit message but in its ability to ‘rework’ the frame of our
perceptions and the dynamism of our affects’ and so generates new forms of subjectivity.
By missing the point of the local dissensus, international artists squeeze out this subjectivity
and depoliticize in a sense the meaning of the wall. Ron (2010, cited in Madsen, 2015),
described his work on the West Bank Wall more as a mode of creation prioritizing the act of
creation itself rather than a destructive act of resistance. If it reflects a non-violent approach
that speaks longer, it also goes against the suffering of the local populations who want to
see the wall destroyed. Some International artists then miss the point of the local: JR ‘Face
to Face’ work aims to show humans and humanity are present beyond the two sides of the
wall by making faces beautiful in their most human form, while they do not enjoy the same
rights according to the side of the wall they are living in. It makes the everyday complexity
of Palestinian life much less visible. Moreover, this sort of embellishment creates an ‘ideal
tourist destination’ (Eifelman, 2011, cited in Netti and Mansour, 2020), and automatically
legitimizes the wall (Thomas, 2010, cited in Netti and Mansour, 2020; Larkin, 2014) rather
than challenging Israelian authorities. By making it beautiful, International artists go against
the hostility the wall represents. Some local population’s artistic act reflects the rejection of
the beautifying practice: Banksy’s Mountain view window work has been covered by a
barren brick wall to obliterate the beautiful aspect.

****

The West Bank Wall is enshrined within a context of international security anxiety
and its materiality is the representation of the Israeli segregationist idea and expansionist

policy. Following a colonial perspective, the wall fragments and relandscapes the space
creating a ghetto that socially, spatially, and legally excludes and secludes. Because of the
failure of International justice and of the application of international law involving
fundamental rights, resistance organizes through artistic expression. Graffiti invades the
wall for local people to reclaim their space. By means of communication and the necessity
to be broadly heard and understood, a mix of cultures and history occurs creating a unique
hybrid cultural identity straddling Arabic, Muslim, Western, Sumud, and Revolutionary
representations. All gathered around trauma, it creates a unified community within local
populations who express themselves to be politically and ‘traumatically free’; to heal.
However, the striking nature of apartheid has led many international artists to take a stand
by taking sides in creating art on the wall sometimes going against the real desire for
representation of the locals and the reality of their sufferings. It questions the colonization
of the suffering of local populations by Western ideologies as well as the efficacity of these
last to reach the masses’ attention about the occurring situation in Palestine.

REFERENCES

Achille, E. and Moudileno, L. (2016). Sémiologie urbaine postcoloniale: Impasse Général
Bugeaud. Romance Studies, 34(3-4), pp.139–151.
Foucault, M., François Ewald and Centre, L. (1997). ‘Il faut défendre la société’ : cours au
Collège de France, 1975-1976. Paris: Seuil.
Fields, G. (2010). LANDSCAPING PALESTINE: REFLECTIONS OF ENCLOSURE IN A HISTORICAL
MIRROR. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 42(1), pp.63–82.
doi:10.1017/s0020743809990535.
Jones, R., Leuenberger, C. and Wills, E.R. (2016). The West Bank Wall. Journal of Borderlands
Studies, 31(3), pp.271–279. doi:10.1080/08865655.2016.1174599.
Larkin (2014). Jerusalem’s separation wall and global message abroad: graffiti, murals, and
the art of Sumud
Madsen, K.D. (2014). Graffiti, Art, and Advertising: Re-Scaling Claims to Space at the Edges
of the Nation-State. Geopolitics, 20(1), pp.95–120. doi:10.1080/14650045.2014.896792.
Netti and Mansour (2020). The Israeli West Bank Wall: Iconographic storytelling
Parry, W. (2010). Against the Wall : the Art of Resistance in Palestine. Cairo: American
University In Cairo Press.
Richter-Devroe and Salih (2014). Cultures of Resistance in Palestine & beyond: on the
politics of Art, Aesthetics, and affect
Roth, M.S. (2012). Memory, trauma, and history : essays on living with the past. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Shalem and Wolf. (2011). Facing the wall : the Palestinian-Israeli barriers. Köln ; London:
Walther König ; New York, Ny.
Vogel, B., Arthur, C., Lepp, E., O’Driscoll, D. and Haworth, B.T. (2020). Reading socio-political
and spatial dynamics through graffiti in conflict-affected societies. Third World Quarterly,
41(12), pp.2148–2168. doi:10.1080/01436597.2020.1810009.
‌‌
Wardle, B. (2016). You complete me: the Lacanian subject and three forms of ideological
fantasy. Journal of Political Ideologies, 21(3), pp.302–319.