Speaking Graffiti: Imaging Human Rights from Belfast to the West Bank

Abstract

The human rights conditions of Northern Ireland and Palestine have been analyzed up, down, and sideways by a robust scholarly literature, this article provides a fresh approach to the analysis of media with respect to cultural aspects of human rights conundrums through images of localized as well as globalized “graffiti.” From the near universal influence of the painting of George Washington and company crossing the Delaware River, to brave but dangerous anti-regime graffiti in North Korea, the political nature of private artists operating in the public realm for human rights is recognized as a potentially destabilizing and regime-busting act. With a lens pointed on Palestine and Northern Ireland, we examine this cultural artifact’s power to get attention, obstruct persecution, and ultimately to mitigate some human rights abuses. How does such graffiti work? What are the similarities and differences in their power for enhancing human dignity through different times and places? We also look at the relationship of human rights graffiti to current political trends internationally. Images are used here as method of analysis that may help explain the broader implications of political graffiti for the study of a particular medium of transmission for the study of cultural and societal norms.

Keywords

Ireland transnational Palestine political aesthetics

Personal Reflexive Statement

On Nakba Day, May 15, 2014 two high school students named Nadeem Nuwara and Mohammed Daher were shot and killed at a demonstration near Ramallah. Surveillance cameras revealed that neither of these young men posed a threat to the soldier (or soldiers) who executed them. Nadeem lived in my neighborhood in the Old City of Ramallah. He was the cousin of one of my students at the university where I worked. She told me “he was just a normal boy who really liked to play basketball“. I recognized him from his martyr or shaheed image as having once held the door of a local grocery store for me as I struggled with my shopping bags. My friend and colleague at the University of Northern Iowa, Evan Renfro was in military intelligence and saw first-hand how human societies are affected by imperialism and conflict. He did foundational research and also lived in Palestine and the greater Middle East. Evan’s research agenda is at the nexus of international relations and cultural studies. As an artist and practitioner, navigating academia, I am grateful for his support in this long-term Speaking Graffiti project.

Setting the Stage

In The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière (2004:38) contends that,

The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought. This proposition should be distinguished from any discourse—positive or negative—according to which everything is “narrative,” with alternations between “grand” narratives and “minor” narratives. The notion of “narrative” locks us into oppositions between the real and artifice where both the positivists and the deconstructionists are lost (2004:38).

In this project, we engage with Rancière’s provocation and contend that it is precisely the unbolting of the “narrative lock” that analyzing images as words in contexts both complementary and contradistinctive can accomplish. Simultaneously real and symbolic, tangible and intangible, and indeed—political and cultural—the images herein serve as a monument to the trans-aesthetics of human rights globally. They are not always pretty, and some are sanguinary. But they do have a power, as Slavoj Žižek contends, “to shift our perspective from the ‘big events, the bombings, the terror, military incursions’ forcing us to consider ‘what happens in Palestine when nothing is happening?’” (Elias 2013:213). As is clear in this contemporary geopolitical moment, the profound indifference to key cultural totems can only either lead to, or be correlated with, political apathy, which allows for the sort of solipsistic foreign policymaking apparatus that the West has found itself ensnared in today. We want to temporize and geographize our project while also shielding the examined works from such boundaries and borders. It is enough to show that in both of the cities examined here, within different states, within different regions, within different hemispheres, the story of these images is the story of modern human rights—gained in one case, deprived in another.

The search for dignity transcends time as well; as these images speak of times past, they all too easily remind us of the present, howling for anyone with eyes to hear. Our analytical journey takes us through the streets of Palestine’s West Bank, primarily in Ramallah, to the alleys of Northern Ireland’s Belfast. What we find is the juxtaposition of despair and hope; images that laugh, cry, and implore the observer to become a witness. Benedict Anderson (2006:133) maintains that,

it is always a mistake to treat languages [and here we would embed images as well] in the way that certain nationalist ideologues treat them—as emblems of nation-ness…Much the most important thing about language is its capacity for generating imagined communities, building in effect particular solidarities [original emphasis].

Examples of Human Rights Imagery

One of the most salient learned truths from this research is that the images, far from working to particularize, or nationalize, the cultural history of human rights problematics, work instead to universalize it by committing the viewer/listener/reader to the question of human rights, privileging dignity above nationalism. Figure 1 is an example of this. Through this maneuver, images that subvert the subordinate/dominant hierarchy transcend simple representation by their aesthetic power. As evidenced in the associated images, a critical image can be erased by a repressive security apparatus, but only temporarily. In this way the image does double-duty: by first providing the subjected populace a sense of the possible, and if then expunged by authorities, it re-emerges to signify the oppressor’s ultimate futility and alternate possibilities for the oppressed’s agency. In the West Bank oppression may be indirect as in Figure 2.

Figure 1.

Solidarity with the Palestinian cause is invoked in many of Belfast’s Republican neighborhoods. This example is in the vicinity of Springhill Avenue, a predominately Catholic area in West Belfast. July 2018.

Figure 2.

The intact mural by Hamza Abu Ayyash on the left was near Bethlehem University in September 2012. The text by a Palestinian poet named Nayef Bazzar reads: “My guts declares my identity.” Sometime during early 2014 the imagistic portion of the mural was whitewashed. February 2014.

While one could no doubt trace the role of images in human rights back well before, Emmanuel Leutze’s (1851) painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware is a convenient place to provide an example of such projects. Washington’s Crossing has “given rise to a very large literature throughout the Western world and has inspired more painting and sculpture by major artists than any other event in American history” (Fischer 2004:425). To date, going on ten generations “have taken up the subject, never twice in the same way” (Fischer, 2004: 425).

Leutze was a “German American immigrant of strong liberal democratic principles, who returned to his native land and strongly supported the Revolutions of 1848…he conceived the idea of a painting that would encourage Europe with the example of the American Revolution” (Fischer 2004:2).

While some have pointed to certain anachronistic or erroneous details of the image (the flag, the light, etc.), the point of it aesthetically and politically was, and continues to be, acknowledged: desperation combined with courage to attain human dignity (Fischer 2004:4). Graffiti and other human rights imagery need not be somehow perfect renderings of the real; after all, it is not reality that is the goal. Usually, the goal in human rights graffiti is the ultimate eradication, or at least mitigation, of political humiliation (see, for example Fischer, 2004; author interviews). It is important for our argument to note the transnational nature of such an image. Whether from an indigenous or immigrant origin and use, such art maintains a re-generative and multigenerational force.

In a very different context, we can also look to graffiti in North Korea, “the most isolated country on earth” (Cha 2013:425). Here we find a salient example of the juxtaposition of imagery for both repressive political control, and as human rights iconography. On one hand, badges of Kim dynasty leaders must be worn at all times by subjects, and work as “a daily reminder of where one’s allegiances stand”; but, on the other hand, anti-regime graffiti does sometime appear and is punishable by torture and imprisonment (Cha 2013:43). Even “an undusted portrait of the leader can get you thrown into a gulag” (p. 108). The North Korean dictatorship certainly understands the power of imagery for oppression, as well as for resistance.

Human Rights Imagery in Palestine and Northern Ireland

Figure 3.

A mural on the Republican International or Solidarity Wall in Belfast Northern Ireland by Republican muralist Danny Devenny depicts a Palestinian woman confronting an Israeli soldier. The text in both Gaelic and Arabic translates as “Our day will come.” July 2006.

Previous works dealing with the cultural history of art and human rights in places like Palestine “strangely avoids any mention of Palestinian artists” and this poses serious questions about “privileged witnesses” (Elias 2013:212). We think this is an excellent point, and want to make clear that all images used in this article are of creations of artists who actually live in the affected communities. Whenever possible, we complement the images, whether from Palestine or Northern Ireland, with interviews from the actual artists involved.

Hamza Abu Ayyash, author of the image in Figure 2, stated in 2014 “I know my limits so I go to professionals like poets, like writers, sometimes ex-prisoners. The one in Bethlehem, he’s holding his head, stretching his stomach and his guts falling around Palestine. The text next to it says, ‘My guts declares my identity.’ The text was from an ex-prisoner friend of mine, Nayef Bazzar. He was jailed when he was sixteen and he was released when he was twenty-four…It’s strong as words. Came from someone who’s never been educated. But he was in prison for eight years. I showed him my sketch and he said many words, many sentences and when he told me that I said stop. This is it: ‘My guts declares my identity.’”

Danny Devenny, when asked about the future of the Republican murals in 2006 stated, “What’s happened now ten years into the peace process, there’s a lot of tourists and media and people are realizing murals can be about different things. They can be about culture, about community issues. The whole point about making the murals is to get our message out, get the attention of millions of people through exposure in the media.” It seems this exposure has always been the purpose, at least for republicans.

Figure 4.

In the summer of 2008 Figure 3 was repainted by Danny Devenny on the 60th anniversary of 1948, known as The Nakba, or catastrophe by Palestinians. The image is a complex intertextual quote, depicting the Israeli separation barrier on an actual separation barrier between Republican and Unionist neighborhoods in Belfast.

The images in this article were recorded over a period of time from June 2005 until July 2018. The photographer (one of the authors) visited and revisited sites with distinctive features many times in an attempt to document the changes over time and in some cases the resilience of these images. The main Hebron Road entrance to the Dheisheh Palestinian Refugee Camp, areas near a checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem most used by tourists and Christian pilgrims, and the International or Republican Solidarity Wall on Falls Road in Belfast are three examples of this longitudinal documentation. The photographs here are selected from a body of over 30,000 images of longitudinal documentation. Like all field photography of any genre there is an inherent element of subjectivity in making decisions on what to make salient.

“You are now entering free Derry” is a well-known inscription on the gable end of an estate at the entrance to Bogside, a working-class neighborhood in what is known as Londonderry to Protestants and Derry to Catholics. It is near the site of the infamous Bloody Sunday event, where in 1972 twenty-eight unarmed Catholic civil rights protesters were shot and fourteen died. Just off Hebron Road in Dheisheh Camp beyond the turnstile hung with Palestinian house-keys is a low wall with painted text that rephrases the Irish Republican territorial warning (itself a reference to protests in Berkeley, California in 1968). To transpose this image from an America University town to Catholic minority ghetto in Northern Ireland to a Palestinian refugee camp deserves notice as an example, a tendril or rhizome, of transnational human rights image-making. Both locations are depicted in Figure 5.

Figure 5.

On the left an image taken at the entrance to the Catholic/Republican neighborhood of Bogside in Derry or Londonderry, N. Ireland in 2005. On the right the transnational quote as it was repainted at the entrance to Dheisheh Camp in February 2014.

Dheisheh was a temporary tent city set up by the Red Cross in 1948. The tents were later replaced by one-room cinder block structures built by the United Nations. A wire fence surrounded the camp and a turn-style gate at the central low point of on Hebron Road was the only way in or out until the Oslo Agreement in 1993. The gate remains as a reminder to residents of their political, social, and cultural humiliation and is now hung with Palestinian house-keys, as in Figure 6, a symbol of the right to return.

Figure 6.

A turnstile at an entrance to the Dheisheh Palestinian Refugee Camp near Bethlehem was at one time the only way in or out of the camp. Today it remains as a reminder to the residents of their continued refugee status. It is festooned with Palestinian house keys a symbol of the right of return. August, 2011.

Today in Dheisheh Camp what was once considered a temporary condition now looks permanent, prompting the need to rethink what it means to be a refugee. The long-term multi-generational status of Palestinian refugee camps along with other global events redefines the term “refugee status.” In some cases, like Dheisheh, within close proximity to World Heritage sites like Bethlehem and Jerusalem, it also makes trans-national intertextual quotes of a visual nature inevitable. This holds true in Belfast as illustrated by the detail from Danny Devenny's Falls Road mural in Figure 7.

Figure 7.

A detail from Figure 4, Devenny’s 2008 Solidarity Wall mural.

As a teenager during “The Troubles” Danny Devenny was shot and arrested while attempting a bank robbery to raise money for the Irish Republican Army (IRA). He was convicted and sent to Long Kesh Prison where he taught himself to draw and came to know Bobby Sands, the first Republican hunger striker to die. After his release from prison he went to Dublin where for a time he become Director of Communications for Sinn Fein, the political party that grew out of the IRA. In Dublin he was again shot this time by an Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) Unionist paramilitary gunman. He returned to Belfast and is largely responsible for the iconic image of Bobby Sands on the side of a Sinn Fein bookstore on Falls Road in Figure 8. Nationalist murals did not emerge until around the time of the Republican hunger strikes in 1981. According to Devenny, “Most of these early IRA murals depicted specific hunger strikers, in particular Bobby Sands” . Today this iconic image remains on the side of a Sinn Fein bookstore on Falls Road in Belfast Devenny states: “Usually we repaint them but we got to kind of like that one” (ibid.).

Figure 8.

Bobby Sands mural on Sinn Fein bookstore on Falls Road in West Belfast. July, 2018.

The Bobby Sands image is quoted in the West Bank and mirrored there by images of Khader Adnan (Figure 9), a Palestinian held by Israel in administrative detention who maintained a hunger strike for sixty-six days. Adnan was released alive. Sands died in prison after exactly the same number of days on hunger strike. These are more than recirculated images and ideas. They are the sometimes tragic, reciprocating cries for justice.

Figure 9.

A stencil of Khader Adnan with padlocked lips in Ramallah. The stencils appeared in 2012 during Adnan’s 60 day hunger strike.

Theorizing Graffiti as Human Rights

We contend that a certain theoretical perspective might help to go beyond perceiving graffiti as random points of interest to cultural history. To not get trapped in the “embarrassingly neutral yet omnipresent term context,” we want to show how the imaged work is carried out, its theoretical underpinnings, and its implications for better understanding the interrelationship between current events, the ideological, and the cultural (Jameson 2016:434). Indeed, graffiti is used here as a specific theoretical vehicle that works to explain the broader implications for the cultural dynamics of human rights internationally. We contend that a useful way to understand what is happening in these images is to follow Fredric Jameson’s (2016:432) advice to utilize a three-pronged analytical model, paying due attention to the current, the ideological, and the cultural. This is in-line with the tradition of visual sociology, as explained by Regev Nathansohn and Dennis Zuev (2013: 1), what we see comprises our visual sphere, and that is precisely “where humans produce, use, and engage with the visual in their creation and interpretation of meanings.” The visual is inextricably linked with the political. Nathansohn and Zuev continue, what we see “interacts with other sociological factors such as class, gender, ethno-racial power relations, and institutionalization, to name a few” (2013:2).

In order to do this, we claim that these images must not be assessed as singular entities, but rather as part of a greater cycle of control, conflict, and compromise. To make sense of this, we can look to Gilles Deleuze and Guattari (2009:7), who problematize this type of an assemblage as a root-like structure or rhizome: “A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.” Elspeth Probyn (2000:17) clarifies that,

in real and theoretical ways, a rhizome is a wonderful entity: it is a type of plant…that instead of having tap roots, spreads its roots outward where new roots can sprout off old. Used as a figure to map out social relations, the rhizome allows us to think about other types of connections.

What we are dealing with here can be pictured, or mapped, as a landscape involving hierarchies, or topographies of power, which have become so omnipresent as to be nearly invisible from critique. It is only by slowing down and unpacking the seemingly mundane conduits of cultural banality—un/simple street graffiti—that critical analysis can be made clear. The notion of such mapping comes from Lawrence Grossberg, who writes, “This analytic project might best be described as a cartography of daily life which attempts to (re)construct at least part of the complex texture of a certain terrain” (1992:63). The assemblage of a popular medium connected to the applications of state violence becomes our terrain, the terra incognita, and the lines, linkages, and conjunctures are the coordinates we can use to answer, albeit always incompletely, questions of power and practice relative to human rights, with this project being one part of that broader agenda.

Part of that agenda emerges from the global recirculation and appropriation of images. Images from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), which become totems of resistance for Republicans in Belfast, Northern Ireland and quotes from famous Irish Republican martyrs—“Our revenge will be the laughter of our children”—painted by Danny Devenny and others in N. Ireland may be found on the Palestinian side of the Israeli separation barrier. In Devenny’s work, Frederic Jamson’s (1981:61-2) idea that “history is the ultimate horizon” of cultural analysis is made manifest as art and commentary as in Figure 10.

Figure 10.

In December 2008 Devenny returned to the mural in Figure 4 as Israel’s Cast Lead military action in Gaza continued. He added his reversal of a John Lennon song lyric and destroyed his own mural by painting the mounting death count over it. When a ceasefire took effect on January 18, 2009 about 1,400 Gazans and 13 Israelis had been killed.

Importantly, we argue that the images under examination here can best be understood by leveraging affect theory and applying it to the relevant politico-cultural realities of which they speak. As John Protevi has shown, “affect is inherently political,” and we would add that the political is inherently affective (2009:50). To clarify what we mean by affect, it is useful to look to Eric Shouse (2005), who has distinguished affect (i.e., “non-conscious experience of intensity; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential”) from emotion (a “display”) and feelings (“personal and biographical”). Additionally, Brian Massumi writes (2002:227),

From the point of view of a given context, affect is the quasi-causal openness of a characteristic interaction underway in that context to a sensing of “something new,” the arrival or irruption of which is expressed in a global qualitative change in the dynamic of the interaction, to sometimes striking effect.

It is not our intention here to conclusively define (and inherently delimit) the notion of affect. It is our intention to make clear to the reader how we are using the term in this project. Massumi (2002:5), paraphrasing Deleuze, argues that,

the problem with the dominant models in cultural and literary [and here, in the spirit of ecumenicalism, we add “political”] theory is not that they are too abstract to grasp the concreteness of the real. The problem is that they are not abstract enough to grasp the real incorporeality of the concrete [Massumi’s emphasis].

In order to bring fresh light on these seemingly intractable human rights issues, we are interested in answering this call for complication of precisely the sort of images that we are analyzing here. Such a step allows for a practicable application of theory toward understanding media involving human rights in various cultural contexts more broadly.

Figure 11.

Two young Palestinian women pose in front of a Solidarity Wall mural on Falls Road in Belfast, July 2018.

The Eyes of Northern Ireland and Palestine Are Upon You

According to the Neil Jarman (2005), Director of the Institute for Conflict Research in Belfast,

Mural painting has been a feature of Unionist popular culture since the early years of the twentieth century when images of King William III and other Orange symbols began to adorn the gable walls of the working class areas of Belfast.

These unionist images were often painted in conjunction with “rituals celebrating unionist culture. Foremost among these rituals is the celebration that commemorates the Battle of the Boyne on July 12 1690” (ibid.). On “The Glorious Twelfth,” Prince William of Orange (colloquially known as King Billy in Northern Ireland) was victorious over King James, winning the English throne and assuring that Ireland would officially remain Protestant. “The Glorious Twelfth” continues to be “a bank holiday in Northern Ireland every July 12, when as many as 200,000 people line the routes to take part in the fervent pro-British celebrations” (Hughes 2019). Bill Rolston, an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Ulster University, noted, “Predictably King Billy constituted the primary icon in loyalist murals” (Rolston 2018). These celebrations and displays were formalized “making seasonal affirmations of loyalty much more permanent” (ibid.). Murals helped to transform areas where Protestants lived into “…Protestant areas. By implication this should also mean that some areas were accepted as ‘Catholic Areas’” (ibid.). After the Partition of Ireland in 1921, police in the north “were utilized to ensure the nationalist population did not develop a similar tradition” of mural painting or anything else indicating an Irish national identity (Jarman 2005). King Billy astride his prancing horse and royal heraldic devices supporting paramilitary groups can still be seen today as proud remnants, or fossils, depending on your perspective.

Figure 12.

A boy from a local fife and drum corp. passes a mural, marking the territory of the Ulster Volunteer Force. a Protestant paramilitary organization., in the Upper Shankill neighborhood of Belfast. July 2006.

Beginning in the 1960s there has been a “splintering of unionism” (Rolston 2018). This fragmentation process is on-going. According to Rolston (ibid), At the Westminster elections of 2017, for the first time since the foundation of Northern Ireland, the total of Unionist votes was lower than that of all other parties, including nationalists and republicans. For a state founded on “guaranteeing a Protestant majority in perpetuity” this was an existentialist shock for Unionism.

Paramilitary imagery was still very much in evidence as a part of Unionist murals in 2005. The concept of marking territory and intimidation through these images seems ingrained though fractured now. Fiona McGaughey (2020:335) argues that these sorts of images created their own law, or the “paralaw” of the respective “paramilitaries,” which worked to “demarcate territory and depict alternative justice systems.” Rolston (2018) notes, there has been a “changing face of Republican murals” the Unionist murals often seem static or in his words “what we have we hold.” There does seem to be a general shift away from paramilitary images in both Loyalist and Republican neighborhoods. The most important question in this regard seems to be how much instability within the Loyalist paramilitaries will affect the peace process going forward. The problem for Loyalists, to quote Bill Rolston, is how to “oppose British policies for the sake of remaining British”. This is the kind of double-bind that fuels the Israel Palestine conflict as well. In that Middle Eastern location, the problem for Israel is how to maintain the identity of a democratic Jewish state while occupying territory whose residents could form a Palestinian, largely Muslim majority. Reaction to large issues like these within the Settler movement in Israel and the West Bank has been to stoke extremist attacks on Palestinian mosques, homes and agriculture especially olive groves. In N. Ireland tangible violence has subsided and partly been replace by a symbolic visual violence. Figure 13 is not unique in East Belfast at this point in time.

Figure 13.

The conflation of Unionist and American segregationist (if not racist) symbolism is a relatively new development in N. Ireland. East Belfast, July 2018.

The Thankless Cause of Palestine

Edward W. Said (2000:xviii) wrote, “Palestine is a thankless cause. Palestine is the cruelest, most difficult cause to uphold, not because it is unjust, but because it is just and yet dangerous to speak about…honestly and concretely.” The danger in speaking about Palestinian human rights is one reason why the images involved here are so important: they provide cover—both in a literal sense, as on the walls used to shield humans from bullets—as well as the metaphorical, as in the image putting itself at risk, rather than any particular individual.

There are few records of Palestinian vernacular image-making, either historically or contemporaneously, until the First Intifada. There was instead, as in all Arab countries because of the Quranic admonition against figurative images and the Quran itself, a long tradition of calligraphic texts. This tradition fed the modern, and continues to feed the post-modern, strains of Palestinian vernacular image-making and fine art. The graffiti artist Hamza Abu Ayyash frequently works with poets on the written texts for his graffiti as in Figures 2 and 14.

Figure 14.

Ayyash painted this work in late 2008 during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. He effectively uses the stencil technique to detail the child angel’s face. According to Ayyesh the text reads reads, “The days we die is our birthdays” or transliterated “Born to die.”

The First Intifada was a popular uprising that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leadership in exile at the time did not anticipate. It began with the deaths of four Palestinian workers in Gaza during December 1983 and did not subside until the Madrid Conference in 1991. Some date the end of this Intifada, literally translated as “shaking off,” (with the implicit object being “the occupation”) as late as 1993. During this time “writing graffiti could be part a performative element in a rite of passage into the Palestinian resistance” (Peteet 1996:144). At this time, political graffiti and murals began to appear on local walls not only as a form of resistance, but also as a channel of communication among the members of a population subjugated by an occupying force.

This dual intent continues to the present with some graffiti and mural artists now creating images that are not only critical of the occupation but also of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the dominant Fatah Party. During President Obama’s visit to the West Bank a stenciled graffito appeared in central Ramallah, depicting the Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, and Obama in a familiar kiss on the lips or bruderkuss. The term originates in Eastern Europe and had special significance during the Communist era. On October 7th 1979 then Soviet Prime Minister Leonid Brezhnev greeted then East German Prime Minister Erich Honecker with a bruderkuss. They were photographed and that image has now recirculated globally thanks to an appropriation of it painted on the Berlin Wall by artist Dmitri Vrubel in 1990. Vrubel titled his piece May God Help me to Survive This Deadly Love and it received widespread acclaim as “particularly striking, with a sharp, satirical edge.”^[s10] The Berlin Wall piece was restored in 2009 and is now widely quoted, including pieces in Lithuania, the United Kingdom and the USA. The 2016 version in Vilnius, Lithuania features Trump and Putin in a similar intimate embrace with the text Make Everything Great Again.

Palestinian graffiti during the First Intifada echoed the numerous mimeographed bulletins put out by popular resistance groups. It thus became a source of information for many Palestinians, linking resistance and solidarity with the daily lives of residents in the occupied territories. In fact, this form of urban expression remains ubiquitous and the most visible sign of the resistance (ibid:145).

The language of these messages was Arabic, however, the diffused leadership of the popular uprising was also clearly aware of the transnational public relations value of other languages. The same tendency has remained consistent as in Figure 15. The persistence of the text/image is notable especially at interfaces where messages, specifically of the oppressed, may be defaced or obliterated and then replaced over a period of years, in a so-called “cat and mouse game” (ibid.).

Figure 15.

On a wall in central Ramallah during President Obama’s visit in 2013 a graffito of he and pa president Mahmoud Abbas in a familiar embrace: another transnational quote.

The First Intifada was mostly a period of non-violent civil disobedience. The Second Intifada, also known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada, was not. It began with then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s 28 September 2000 visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This location, within the walls of the Old City, is home to the holiest site in Judaism, the Western or Wailing Wall, and the third holiest site in Islam, the Al-Aqsa Mosque. For some, the visit “symbolically triggered” the Second Intifada and Sharon’s motivation for this visit is still a matter of conjecture (Ochs 2011:6). Riots, suicide bombings, and extra-judicial killings subsequently tormented Israel and Palestine, marking an escalation in the face of Israeli aggression. The death toll, both military and civilian, is often estimated to be 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis. B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, puts the number of Palestinian dead at 4,000. The discrepancy lies in differing views of when the Second Intifada ended.

As an easily accessible form of vernacular communication when other mass venues were foreclosed by the occupation, calligraphic graffiti proliferated. And with so many casualties it is not surprising that strictly textual messages found themselves in competition for space on Palestinian walls with images of martyrs (or Shaheed). It was also during the Second Intifada that English and other languages started appearing alongside Arabic in graffiti and murals. This is a trend that continues today especially in and around Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Ramallah where transnational communication through vernacular expressions of image making is most likely to find its international audience.

Figure 16.

A mural at the entrance to the Aida P. R. Camp in Bethlehem sends another clear transnational message in English. The mural faces a camp entrance often used by I.D.F. personnel during incursions.

The Prescriptions of Power: Where Good Taste Is a Privilege

The present power dynamic between Israel and the Palestinians is very different than between Loyalists and Republicans in Northern Ireland where near parity has been achieved.

Israel dominates the Palestinians with military and economic control. The United States is complicit in this arrangement as, at present, the dominant global actor in the region. One of the qualitative earmarks of this dominance is the prescriptive use of icons and symbols in official and vernacular image making. In Israel, a state that identifies as Jewish, the dominant prescriptive image is the Star of David or the Magan David. To be sure, there are alternative Israeli vernacular images. In the West Jerusalem neighborhood of Musrara is graffiti clearly meant to address the conflict. “The introduction of unsolicited art into urban visual space is a refreshing if not essential act of opposition” (Waclawek 2011: 112).

Figure 17.

A graffito in West Jerusalem just behind the main post office comments on the struggle, conflict, or situation, depending upon your semantic persuasion. November 2013 It is an oblique and rare commentary.

However, Israeli graffiti directly critical of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians is rare and localized. Everywhere is a plethora of blue six-pointed stars from official to unofficial displays. In touristic tee-shirt stalls from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, the Israeli national and religious symbol is conflated with American cartoon characters and sports team logos as in Figure 18. In the West Bank, illegal settlements display banners seeking to influence American policy. This speaks to Israel’s political orientation toward the West. More ominous are carvings in bus-stop benches near settlements in the West Bank and Stars of David painted on Palestinian homes and mosques as part of radical settler “price-tag” attacks. In these cases, the graffiti serves to intimidate subaltern groups as was (and is) the case in Northern Ireland.

Figure 18.

T-shirts at a merchant street-side stall in West Jerusalem. July 2009.

Israeli settler image-making also seeks a trans-national platform, though in a way that is limited and, in some ways analogous to Irish Unionist image-making. Israeli Settler image-making is limited in range as is Unionist image-making in Northern Ireland. It is our contention that dominant and formerly dominant groups find solace in prescriptive image-making at the same time subordinated groups display a willingness to shock and defy the restrictions of “good taste” as in Figures 19 and 20

Images of the dead, often considered martyrs, sometimes copied from photographs in the newspaper, are recreated in a variety of forms on city and refugee camp walls. “Good taste” is not a factor in a brutally subordinated culture’s vernacular image making. It is in a dominant culture where images of the dead, much less their faces, rarely appear. For some, good taste is indeed a privilege.

Figure 19.

The Al Dalu children as the headline in a West Bank newspaper after the Israeli air-strike that killed them on the left. On the right one week later the calculated transnational media-friendly poster in English.

Figure 20.

The International Wall in West Belfast, July 2018. Irish Republican and Palestinian prisoners symbolically clasping hands.

NonConclusion

History does not end. In places as seemingly disparate (and desperate) as Northern Ireland and Palestine, or Ferguson and Compton, and on streets, and in alleys, around the world, the fight for human rights continues, with varying degrees of success. Beyond analyzing the specific image/texts, we have explained their power in this political moment. Paying attention to graffiti enables us to understand the broader implications of what oppressed communities are “saying” as a means for analyzing human rights internationally. We contextualized the images in order to make sense of the associated realities of power and the lack thereof. We have traveled with these images across time and space to show their relation to human rights. As unfortunate as the political realities in these places and beyond have been, there is a current of deterioration in terms of human dignity globally. Already executive orders have been issued by the current US president that, overnight, stopped many humans in greatest need from seeking refuge within the borders of the country, and this is only the beginning of a new politics of anti-solidarity. According to the most recent figures of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR 2020) there are nearly 71 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, which is an historical record. All of this serves to remind us of Theodor Adorno’s (2005:105) cri de coeur, “stupidity is not a natural quality, but one socially produced and reinforced.” As regimes of dehumanizing politics gain dominance, we can look to these images as emblems, reminders, of what solidarity might look like. As Edward W. Said wrote,

Remember the solidarity here and everywhere in Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia, and remember also that there is a cause to which many people have committed themselves, difficulties and terrible obstacles notwithstanding. Why? Because it is a just cause, a noble ideal, a moral quest for equality and human rights (Harlow 2003:4).

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Philip Hopper

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