Bethlehem, a West Bank town close to Jerusalem, has historically been one of the world’s most hospitable spaces. The city is enriched and even sustained by tourism, which made up at least sixty percent of its economy before the wall. But, in a regime dominated by the Barrier, those very qualities that in normal times would prove a boon to a tourist-driven economy are a burden and a source of economic strain.

Referred to locally as the jidar al-fasl al-unsuri (wall of segregation) and by the Israeli state as the hafrada geder (separation fence), the Barrier is defined by its architects as essential if terrorist attacks are to prevented. For Bethlehem, it is hard to understand how this structure, made of concrete lined with barbed wire, could be described as a mere fence. Viewed from outside the Occupied Territories, however, the label makes more sense. The wall appears less intimidating from the vantage point of an Israeli road, where it resembles a highway barrier looming in the distance, or a mirage that flickers according to the angle of the sun.

The material substance of the wall varies according to the territories it intersects. In some places, it is a series of electric fences, and in others a configuration of wires and cameras topped by a watchtower, which, however, is only rarely staffed by a guard. For most of its length, the wall is a tall concrete slab fronted by wires and surveillance mechanisms aimed to prevent anyone from touching it. The wall in Bethlehem affords something of an exception to this pattern, in that large swathes of grey cement are left unprotected by barbed wire, making it easier to approach and to turn into a work of art.

Banksy’s distinctive style has aroused considerable controversy among the local Palestinian population. By contrast, the international reaction has been more uniformly positive. Partly through the murals Photo by Ted Swedenburg. of Banksy and his cohorts, Bethlehem was transformed into a new tourist destination: every day, Palestinian minibuses of organized tour companies bring small groups of tourists to specific parts of the wall on which international graffiti artists left their mark.

By 2011, touristic interest in the graffiti on the wall seems to have faded. The attention span of the international community has in this instance proven characteristically brief, while the long-term political effect of the international activist community’s rendering up of the segregation wall as a global canvas have yet to be ascertained. When Banksy painted murals on the wall during a tour of the West Bank, he encountered negative reactions from local Palestinians who were displeased by his aestheticization of their suffering. “We don’t want beautiful,” complained one man, “we hate this wall. Go home.”

Banksy’s representations are provocations that are as likely to disturb local Palestinians through their trivialization of the wall and thereby of Palestinian suffering as to awaken the political sensibilities of his western audience. To the artist’s credit, Banksy occasionally foregrounds in his art the ethical ambiguities intrinsic to his aestheticization of the wall, and does not sentimentalize his politically comprised intervention. However, the fact that the artist registers these ambiguities does not relieve the viewer of the imperative to confront the political limitations of such forms of artistic expression.

The globalization of representation is nothing new. Audience is key: a global public overdetermines the content, form, and substance of what is recognized as representable. Reflecting on the almost exclusively Arabic-language graffiti of the first intifada (1987-1993), anthropologist Julia Peetet noted how, on the rare occasions when graffiti was inscribed on Palestinian walls in English rather than Arabic, it was deployed to speak to the West. In keeping with its intended audience, the frequency of English-language graffiti increased with the arrival of foreign delegations. By encoding themselves as globalized testimonies, Palestinian graff iti, Peetet argues, “took their place among other forms of resistance” and came to constitute “a voice for those who felt voiceless in the international arena.” Such graffiti also anticipated the post-intifada West Bank wall as a global canvas.

Due to the complications of language choice and the historical allusions described above, the graffiti adorning the segregation wall today cannot be rendered so transparently in terms of a lexicon of resistance. Narratives of dispossession are inscribed on the wall, but these visual renderings are heavily interpolated by the perceived expectations of a globalized public sphere. Bethlehem’s canvas has been superimposed against the will of local inhabitants. As if in response to the coercive imposition of a massively politicized structure, the images on the wall pursue different representative strategies.

They evoke domesticity and daily life while often—if not always—avoiding the paraphernalia of conflict. They work through metaphors and historical allusions—above all to both pre and post WWII Germany— while avoiding incendiary calls-toarms. The graffiti on the apartheid wall too are the graffiti of resistance, but the resistance they narrate is mediated by a constellation of audience expectations more globally implicated than that which informs other graffiti elsewhere in the world. At the same time, this representation – al difference, which is fundamentally a difference in reception, attests to the many transformations undergone by the Palestinian resistance, together with its objects and subjects, since the first intifada. As has been shown, the apartheid wall’s graffiti consists largely of an archist slogans, deliberately ironic depictions of domestic bliss, and learned allusions to the speeches of John F. Kennedy.

For the most part, it would seem to include everything other than what one might expect to find on Palestinian territory: the local voices of resistance. Instead of resisting in the stereotyped sense, Palestinians are often most concerned with simply getting by. For this reason, Bethlehem’s ingenious local entrepreneurs have turned to the wall as a space for posting advertisements. With the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2001 and the subsequent stranglehold that followed on Bethlehem’s economy, local resident Joseph Hazboun shut the doors of his restaurant, which he imaginatively called Bahamas Seafood Restaurant, thereby himself evoking the global circulation of meanings that is Bethlehem’s forte.

As his restaurant directly fronted the wall at one of its highest points, Hazboun temporarily lost his entire customer base. Unable to keep his restaurant afloat financially, he relocated to the United States. Hazboun returned to Bethlehem in 2008. As he explains in a brief narrative posted directly onto the wall facing his restaurant, Hazboun decided to make the most out of a bad situation and painted his restaurant’s menu over the blank concrete surface.