Suspected Banksy artwork appears in London: The artist’s long connection with Palestine

The Flower Thrower, Flower Bomber, Rage, or Love is in the Air is a 2003 stencil mural in Beit Sahour in the West Bank by the graffiti artist Banksy. (Via Wikimedia Commons)

What Banksy has said about Gaza

One of Banksy’s most powerful statements on the Israel-Palestine conflict perhaps is his 2015 video, sarcastically projected as a tourism initiative, inviting people to visit Gaza. Its caption reads, “Make this the year you discover a new destination… Welcome to Gaza.”

The footage that follows documents Gaza’s devastated buildings, with the text mentioning how “the locals like it so much they never leave,” adding, “because they’re not allowed to”. As the scene cuts to Israeli military, Banksy shares facts about the occupation — from the “exclusive setting”, “surrounded by a wall on three sides and a line of gun boats on the other”, to how it is “watched over by friendly neighbours”.

He tells his viewers how in 2014, Operation Protective Edge (military operation conducted by Israel) “destroyed 18,000 homes” and also refers to its now much-discussed “network of illegal tunnels”. A Palestinian man comments on one of the Banksy paintings of a cat wearing a pink bow: “This cat tells the whole world that she is missing joy in her life. The cat found something to play with. What about our children?”

It ends with a quote spray-painted on a wall, reading: “If we wash our hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless we side with the powerful – we don’t remain neutral.”

Banksy’s Bethlehem hotel with no view

In March 2017, Banksy took to Instagram to announce his hospitality venture, the Walled Off Hotel, located next to the West Bank wall, “500 metres from the checkpoint to Jerusalem and a mile from the centre of Bethlehem”. It boasts “scenic rooms” which include a presidential suite, “customised” guest rooms painted by artists such as Banksy, Sami Musa and Dominique Petrin, and budget accommodation “outfitted with surplus items from Israeli military barracks”.

While a gallery in the premises showcases works of Palestinian artists, a museum features audio-visual presentations that include an animated history of the region, military pornography and excerpts from the Oscar-nominated documentary 5 Broken Cameras, alongside one of those cameras on display. The gift shop, meanwhile, offers merchandise by Banksy.

Boasting a five-star rating on TripAdvisor, among the highlights of the boutique hotel are Banksy’s works that include feathers painted across a wall depicting a pillow fight between an Israeli soldier and Palestinian youth, a monkey dressed as a porter, and cheetah painted in the presidential suite.

One of the artist’s triptychs once installed in the hotel, Mediterranean Sea View, sold at a 2020 Sotheby’s auction for £2.23 million, with the proceeds donated to the Bethlehem NGO.

In a post dated October 12, 2023, the hotel website regrets being closed for the time being due to major developments in the region.

The British artist’s works in the region

One of Banksy’s earliest graffiti here was the 2003 mural in Jerusalem, Love Is In The Air, also known as Flower Thrower. Painted shortly after the construction of the West Bank Wall, the stenciled work shows a young man leaning back with his arm stretched outwards, to throw something aggressively — instead of a bomb or a grenade, it is a bouquet of flowers, representing peace and beauty.

If in the wall work “The Armoured Dove” a dove wearing a bulletproof vest is seen in Bethlehem, another work has a small girl in a pink dress, thought to be Palestinian, frisking an Israeli soldier. A donkey is being asked for its identity card by an Israeli soldier in a spray-painted wall, and another mural in Beit Hanoun has a figure painted on a door destroyed by Israeli military — wearing a head scarf, the piece is arguably inspired by the Greek mythological figure Niobe, who transformed into a weeping stone after mourning the death of her children.

One of his most talked about projects in the region, meanwhile, are the set of large murals painted on the segregation wall in 2005. In one of the works, two boys are playing with buckets and shovels, creating sandcastles on a beach painted on an ostensibly broken section on the wall. In another part of the wall, Banksy paints a variation of his iconic Girl With Balloon with helium balloons. Yet another work has a ladder to crossover.

A 2015 report in The Independent quotes the artist as stating: “Gaza is often described as ‘the world’s largest open air prison’ because no-one is allowed to enter or leave. But that seems a bit unfair to prisons — they don’t have their electricity and drinking water cut off randomly almost every day.”