Banksy in Bethlehem

During the last decade or so, the now-infamous graffiti artist "Banksy" has tagged walls, streets, even livestock, all around the world. The West Bank holds an important space in this global map of resistance. In addition to being beautiful and thought-provoking ways of saying "fuck you", Banksy's graffiti in Bethlehem has also become a tourist attraction. While documenting the graffiti on the security wall I was approached by numerous cabdrivers and asked, "You like the graffiti? Do you want to see Banksy? I'll take to you Banksy (student price!)". I was even pegged as an admirer of graffiti while at the Church of the Nativity when a cabdriver was trying to coerce me to go (anywhere?) with him. "You do not want to see Shepard's field? Well, what about the Banksy? You would love Banksy, come on, I'll take you there."






(the scissors is a Banksy piece. I don't know who did the hand- but I like it)


I had seen a few Banksy pieces during my brief trip to Bethlehem in 2008, although at the time I was not familiar with his work. The picture above is from December, 2008, and the photo below is from May 2010. I might like the latter picture better. Emerging from behind a pile of rubble, the figures seem more natural, more integrated into the urban space.
The next two photos show change as well- the first photo is mine, and the photo below it is an image of the original work. The graffito's impact has changed over time, but it is still striking. Perhaps more so when you realize that the wall of blue bricks overlays a window into a paradise of sorts....


(photo credit: worldpress online)

Day 1

I arrived at the Ben-Gurion airport on Friday afternoon, May 14. I was tired from my trip, and tired from the semester I had just finished at Reed. I had only napped for an hour or two before my morning flight, and I don't think that I sobered up until I was part-way to Philadelphia. I really wanted a cigarette. On the walk from the terminal to customs I was stopped by a woman police officer, "can I see your passport? What is the purpose of your trip? Are you alone?" Fuck...


(photo credit: Bruce's MidEast Soundbites)


....I told her that I was traveling alone, I was going to go to Jerusalem, to Tel-Aviv and the Dead Sea, as a tourist. "I see you have been to Jordan, and Egypt, and Morocco." I told her I was a student in Egypt in 2008, I had done some traveling around while I was abroad. "Where are you staying?" I told her that I was staying in a hostel, and that I had some friends in Israel who were into social activism. Oops. What kind of social activism? Gay rights in Israel... I was interested in seeing where my friend worked and learning more about it. She gave me back my passport. When I got to the customs man in his little tollbooth he looked at my passport, asked the purpose of my trip ("tourism!"), gave me a wide smile, and told me to step aside. Fuck. He sent me to a waiting space. There were two or three single Arab men in the room, and a young Arab couple- the woman was wearing a hijab. FuckShitFuck. This was clearly not a short-wait sort of a waiting room. A woman called me into a back room, I had to leave my bag in the waiting room. She asked me about my trip to Israel, what I was doing- I told her I was a tourist. I told her that I enjoyed my time in Egypt and Jordan, but was interested in Israel as well, and wanted to come spend some time here. No, I am not Jewish. No, I did not come with a friend. She went away for a while, came back, told me to go sit outside again. In the waiting room a man picked up his phone and started to make a call. The guard in the room yelled at him in English, "Put that away! You cannot talk on your phone!" The man went to put the phone in his bag, "Do not touch your bag!". The man sat back down. A woman appeared at the entrance of the room. "Heeder?" I picked up my backpack and followed her into an office. A man was sitting at a desk with a computer, the woman stood behind him. She looked like a total bitch. Also, sometimes I don't get along with other women, so I was hoping that the man would be nicer to me. Maybe he would think that I was cute and adventurous, a ballsy little thing all alone in the Middle East. "Why are you here?" I said I was a tourist. I explained the stamps on my passport. I gave them the business cards of my Israeli contacts. I was aware that social activists are not popular with most Israelis, especially the ones in uniform, but I figured that was better than pretending that I didn't know anyone in the region. Knowing Israelis was clearly better than knowing Palestinians, even if the Israelis were leftists, right? Maybe not. The woman was speaking to the man in Hebrew and he was (presumably) translating. "Sign onto your e-mail". I was taken aback. Okay. Using his computer I logged onto my Reed e-mail account. I had an e-mail from a Palestinian acquaintance K. Houssani in my inbox. K. is an older friend of a friend, and I had stayed with him a couple of years ago in Jerusalem. I had to answer a lot of questions about K.- how I knew him, was I staying with him, had we been in contact during my last year an a half in the states? They asked me to log into my other e-mail account. I logged into my second, and last, e-mail account. G-mail. There were only messages from the library about overdue books, and e-mails from Wells Fargo informing me about how little money was in my account. The woman said something in Hebrew and glared at me with her icy blue eyes. "What is your other e-mail?" asked the man? I don't have another e-mail. "What is your other e-mail?" There is no other e-mail! "What is your OTHER e-mail?!" I didn't really know what else to tell him- at the time I only had two e-mail addresses, and neither was that interesting. They told me to start taking things out of my bag. The woman snatched up my copy of 'Gravity's Rainbow' (which I still haven't managed to successfully read) and asked what it was. A fiction book? She flipped through the pages. They pulled out my journals, one of which had my list of couch-surfing contacts with names, locations, and phone numbers. "What is this?! Are you going to Ramallah, to Nablus, to Bethlehem and Hebon?" Fuckagain, I decided that it was pretty impossible for me to lie my way out of this situation. So I told the truth. I was there in Israel because I was doing a project about graffiti in Palestine. It's something that I had been researching for a while, my college had paid for my trip so that I could do original research, I wanted to go to the West Bank, if it was possible. I spoke to the man and, looking at his face, I realized how foolish I had been to hope that I could somehow charm my way out of a confrontation. The woman was a bitch, for sure, but this man had a cruel smile on his face. His eyes weren't icy- they were blank. I started to worry that I wouldn't be able to get into the country at all. I would have to turn around and take a plane home. The man picked up my wallet, took out my cash, and handed it to me. The man started to pull things out of my wallet and show them to the woman. My visa cards, business cards, a photo of my little brother, one of the whitest people I know. "Who is this?!" I started to tear up. My brother, it's my little brother! Why were they doing this to me? I just wanted to go smoke a Marlboro, find a place to sleep, take a nap, take a shower. Again, that cruel smile. "You can go sit down in the waiting room again. Leave your computer, your phone, your wallet and your books." I told them I wasn't comfortable with them having access to my computer without me there- could I stay in the room? No. I took my sorry self to the bathroom, where I cried for a minute, washed my face, and headed back to the waiting room. The room had lost some of its people (detainees?) , and gained new ones. I was still the only white person in the room. I leaned my head up on my backpack and closed my eyes. I drifted off, and woke up with the cold woman standing in front of me. "Come with me." We went back to the office with the man. "Do you know why you are here?" No. "Because you are traveling alone, we think you may have come here to make trouble. What is this project about graffiti? Do they not have graffiti in America? Why don't you study that?" Because it's not the same? I don't want to make trouble, just to see things. "I see." They sent me back to the waiting room. I waited, vaguely watching the comings and goings of other people, wishing I could smoke, hoping that I didn't get sent back to America. Finally, the woman with cold eyes came out and handed me my phone. A while later, my wallet and books. And finally, my laptop and my passport. The whole process took a good three or four hours. "You can go."

Qualquilya

Geographically speaking, Qualquilya is an incredibly interesting place because it is entirely surrounded by a border wall/ fence, and there is only one point for general entry into the city. This checkpoint is between Qualquilya and the rest of the West Bank. During the day it is manned by soldiers from the Palestinian Authority, but at night the checkpoint is taken over by IDF soldiers. The town is like a Palestinian island, surrounded by Israel, with a drawbridge connecting it to the greater West Bank.





On May 24, a Monday morning, I took a service van from Nablus to Qualquilya. Upon arriving in Qualquilya I noticed a lot of local graffiti around town- this was the sort of graffiti that I had been researching back in the States. I can't read Arabic, but I supposed that a lot of the graffiti was advertising political factions. My suppositions were confirmed by locals, who were especially proud of Fatah's tags. "In Gaza? That is Hamas, but here in Qualquilya we are supporters of Fatah- you know Fatah? PLO?" I also saw PLFP and DFLP tags (in English letters). This was all very different from the graffiti I had seen on the security wall around Bethlehem, Qualandia, and Ramallah....






....After a few minutes of walking around and taking photos of the downtown area, I was stopped by a young man outside of a shop. He spoke some English, and was curious about what I was doing in Qualquilya. Was I an activist? Did I speak Arabic? Was I alone? Really?! It was the same line of questioning that I encountered everywhere that I went but, unlike most of the other places, there was no sign of other foreigners. The lack of graffiti in English should have tipped me off to the fact that I would encounter a serious language barrier in Qualquilya. The young man, who introduced himself as Ahmed, took me over to his friend's store so we could sit and chat. Within a few minutes Ahmed, his friend Abdullah, and I were smoking gnargeela (hookah) and trying our best to have a conversation. The tobacco was awesome, but the conversation was sort of frustrating. Ahmed was the only one of the two who spoke any English, and I'm not sure if he didn't understand my attempts to explain my research project, or if he was just disinterested. I'd gotten into the habit of pulling out my camera to help explain my purpose in the West Bank, "I'm studying graffiti. You know, like aerosol on the wall between Israel and Palestine? Look." Oftentimes when I showed people the pictures on my camera screen they would immediately understand and point me in the direction of some cool local graffiti. Ahmed's reaction was more along the lines of, "ohh... it's very beautiful, yes? Beautiful like you. Do people here say ahlan ya helwa to you? You know 'helwa'?" This interaction was uncomfortably reminiscent of my time in Cairo. Abdullah invited me to go to the back of the store to grab a soda, which I did, and was rewarded with an ever-so gentle ass-groping. This was exactly like Cairo, and I had to get out of it. Sometimes if takes a little abuse for me to realize how well I'm generally treated. Throughout my trip in the West Bank I was surprised by how little I was hassled- within my first week of arriving in Cairo I got felt up twice on the street, and had a bolt thrown at my ass (I still loved being in Cairo, though. I just had to get a little smarter about how I conducted myself, and a couple of Egyptian dudes had to get kicked in the shins). During this trip I met two Palestinian men who spent a lot of time with foreigners, and both told me that harassment against foreign women in Palestine was on the decline. It seems that as a culture, Palestinian men have been working to distance themselves from the 'grope-y Arab man' stereotype. Don't bite the hand that feeds you, I guess. Anyway, I was an am extremely appreciative that many men have adopted this attitude- maybe some Palestinian men can come to Portland and put drunk American cat-callers in their place some day...

Wherever I went, people were invested in hooking me up with other English speakers. People would say, "No, my English is not so good, but wait, my cousin..." and then they would go get their cousin, or friend, or brother, and we would speak together. Someday, when my lazy ass finally learns Arabic, I'll be much less limited in the company that I keep. But for this trip, most of my prolonged social interactions were necessarily with teenaged guys, middle-aged men, people who work with tourists and, of course, other foreigners. My English-speaking friend in Qualquilya was a man named Suqar. He was probably in his mid-forties, and had learned English a few decades ago in India. This meant that his English was pretty immaculate, but he had a totally unexpected accent. I was really lucky that the two of us were introduced. On top of giving me coffee and candy, which are two of my favorite things, he gave me a tour of Qualquilya and the security wall/ fence in his air-conditioned car. Most of the Israel/ Palestine border in this area is a fence- but there is a stretch of concrete wall. This wall had the same sort of graffiti I was used to seeing: little drawings and ultimatums delivered in English....
















I was glad that I got to see the fence as well, even though it is not a proper canvas for graffiti. Most of the "security" wall in the West Bank is made up of fencing, rather than concrete. Concrete walls are crazy because you can hear what is happening on the other side- when I was in al-Ram I was really tripped out by the sounds of cars and children's voices (in Arabic) that were perhaps only five, ten, or twenty feet from me. It is hard to wrap your mind around the fact that the anonymous sounds are from a different country. Without the visual impact of the wall, you would imagine that you were hearing noises from another block of the same neighborhood. The fence has a similar, but different, psychological impact on the observer. From a distance, the fence is camouflaged by the land. Palestinian olive trees blend imperceptibly with Israeli olive trees. Looking out onto the landscape I was aware that I was looking at two countries, but it was impossible to tell the Palestinian parts from the Israeli parts- when did one turn into the other? It is completely ridiculous.

Sheikh Jarrah

Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, has been a source of contention between Israelis and Palestinians for decades. In the 1950s the Jordanian government relocated Palestinian refugees to the area. However, Sheikh Jarrah was seized by the state of Israel in the 1967 war. Since then the legal ownership of the homes has been highly disputed: Palestinians were allowed to live as tenants if they paid rent, but a group of Sephardic Jews claimed ownership of the land, but Palestinians produced legal documents from the Ottoman Empire proving their claim to the land, but then parts of Sheikh Jarrah were occupied by Sephardic settlers. In 2001 a Sephardic family forcibly occupied a Palestinian home in Sheikh Jarrah, and in 2009 the Israeli courts granted this family legal residency. The home (below) has been decorated with a giant menorah replica, as well as Israeli flags. It is literally across the street from another (disputed) Palestinian home. It is difficult to find objective articles about Sheikh Jarrah, so I have included links to a few different sites:


sheikhjarrah.com
International Solidarity Movement
Haaretz News on Sheikh Jarrah, David Grossman (also, searching for 'Sheikh Jarrah' at Haaretz.com will give you access to many more articles)
Ir Amim
Israel National News, Op-Ed




Every Friday people gather in East Jerusalem's neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah to protest the [illegal] Jewish settlements in the area. On May 28, the last Friday of my trip, I was a participatory observer (observant participator? Badass anthropologist?) on the small march from Damascus Gate to the large protest at Sheikh Jarrah....






...the people marching were a small, but very enthusiastic and charismatic, group of mostly young Israeli adults. During the march people were drumming, chanting and singing. These youtube videos will give you a good idea of the protest:

Weekly Protest, 1/01/10
Weekly Protest 12/18/09


The march and the protest at the square had a completely different feel from the protest I attended at Bil'in. I was told that the 5/28 protest was unusually drama-free, so perhaps my view is innacurate, but the whole thing felt much more peaceful, and perhaps more inspired. I can't escape my Quaker roots, and so the pacifism of Sheikh Jarrah- the lack of tear gas and stone-throwing- really appealed to me. However, Israeli soldiers were (of course) present at the protest.









...my political sympathies aside, Sheikh Jarrah was also a great place to see graffiti. There is a sort of graffiti war happening between the residents and supporters of Sheikh Jarrah, and the Jewish settlers in the area. The graffiti below is about three blocks from the occupied homes, across the street from the square where the protest takes place.




...there is also a lot of graffiti on and around the contested homes in Sheikh Jarrah.




















...and the Tent