Home > Olives & Thorns > Archives > 2008 > September > 05 > Entry
Long live Israel! Border police rock!
In the first few years after it was built, the wall that slices through the West Bank, isolating communities and separating Palestinian farmers from their land, became a tableau for protest.
Mainly Europeans, some famous graffiti artists, came to express outrage over the Israeli occupation by depicting elaborate images of destruction and sometimes rebirth or Palestinian iconography such as the checkered headdress or the key that represents the claim to the right of return. There were also slogans in all manner of languages, but almost never Arabic or Hebrew.
Israel explains the wall as a security measure — suicide bombings have all but ceased since it was erected around Jerusalem’s Palestinian hinterlands — but international activists saw it as a potent symbol of division and inequality.
Few Palestinians contributed to the graffiti. In an internal debate in 2004 and ’05, shortly after the wall was completed across much of the West Bank, Palestinians largely preferred to see the wall as it was: a hulking, ugly concrete barrier. To beautify the wall would be to accept it or make it somehow more bearable.
But, in recent years, the international graffiti artists have moved on and the wall is used more often as a surface for self-promotion, for Israelis and Palestinians to express the mundane rather than the political.
In Abu Dis, a Jerusalem suburb that is dissected by the wall, the Palestinian, “DJ Murad,” advertises himself.
In the northern Jerusalem suburb of Al-Ram, where the wall also cleaves a Palestinian community into two parts, English graffiti shouts: “Ice Dragons.” Rock band? Street hockey team?
In Hebrew: “Border police rock.”
There are smiling stars of David and a Jewish Shabbat prayer.
“Long live Israel,” one slogan read in Hebrew, so straightforward that it hints at sarcasm.
Even the political seems more philosophical, the wall having long since become a fact on the ground, whether accepted or not: “One God made us all. Why are we betraying one another?”
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