Here is an uncomfortable proposition: Banksy, the most celebrated protest artist of his generation, has done more to preserve the Israeli separation barrier than to dismantle it. That is not his intention. It may not even be his fault. But two decades after he first spray-painted murals on the West Bank wall, the evidence points in one damning direction—his art has helped transform an instrument of occupation into a cultural landmark, and cultural landmarks are very difficult to tear down.

In August 2005, Banksy and his team painted a series of large murals on the barrier under the aim of Israeli soldiers. The works were brilliant: a trompe-l’œil hole revealing a tropical beach, children building sandcastles against eight metres of concrete, a girl lifted skyward by balloons. They were also, from the Palestinian perspective, immediately suspect. A local man told Banksy to his face: “We don’t want this wall to be beautiful. We hate it. Go home.” That anonymous Palestinian grasped something that the international art world has spent twenty years failing to understand. A wall that people travel across the world to photograph is a wall that has acquired a constituency for its own survival.

Consider what has happened since. Bethlehem’s barrier section has become one of the most visited stretches of concrete on earth. Tour buses arrive daily. Guides lead groups from mural to mural. Souvenir shops sell postcards of the very structure that confines the population selling the postcards. In 2017, Banksy opened the Walled Off Hotel directly opposite the wall, billing it as the hotel with the worst view in the world. It is witty, politically committed, and enormously popular. It is also a business whose existence depends on the wall remaining exactly where it is. The hotel’s rooms overlook Israeli watchtowers. Its museum documents the history of the barrier. Remove the barrier and you remove the hotel’s entire reason for being. Banksy has, in effect, created an enterprise with a commercial interest in the perpetuation of the thing it protests. The irony is excruciating.

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© The Times of Israel (Blogs)