Architectural parallax,neoliberal politics and the universality of the Palestinian struggle: Banksy’s Walled Off hotel

Introduction

Many of the preoccupations of the literature on the Palestinian struggle for freedom today remain locked within analyses of the dialectic between Zionist settler-colonial violence and indigenous Palestinian resistance. These analyses examine the struggle at both material and discursive levels and within realist (historical or documentary) and anti-realist representational frames that invoke a wide range of artistic techniques, including indigenous aesthetics and postmodern citational practices (Hochberg, 2017). While registering the impact of the Ongoing Nakba (Al-Nakba Al-mustemera) – that is, the Zionist settler-colonial project’s relentless politics of deracination and depopulation, through its amply documented ethnic cleansing campaigns, genocidal policies and apartheid practices in Palestine, these analyses are generally grounded in appeals to either cultural particularity or empty abstract universality. Critics thus frame their analyses within discourses about steadfastness (‘Sumud’), cultural heritage, indigeneity, civil resistance, decolonization and the cosmopolitan human rights regime that tend to culturalize the struggle, presenting it in terms of multicultural tolerance and respect for the Other. ¹ As such, the more radical implications of the Palestinian struggle for freedom at this historical juncture continue to be completely evacuated and erased.

This article interrogates the Walled Off hotel, a boutique hotel cum art installation, museum and gallery that the elusive British ‘guerrilla’ graffiti artist Banksy opened in 2017 in Bethlehem, Palestine, in collaboration with a local Palestinian graffiti writer and entrepreneur, as an exemplary case of what the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek calls ‘architectural parallax’. ² The Walled Off hotel raises critical questions about the contradictions of post-Oslo Palestine within the neoliberal political-economic realities of the global capitalist system, clearing a space for drawing out the implications of the fundamental antagonism (the class struggle) in the context of the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Through this architectural parallax, the Walled Off hotel invokes the radical dimension of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, that Žižek refers to after Hegel as ‘concrete universality’. ³ Reworking his Hegelian ideas in the Palestinian context, I thus argue that re-positing the question of the Palestinian struggle in the language of concrete universality makes it possible to recognize the immanent universal dimension at the core of Palestinian particular identity. It also links the Palestinian struggle to other struggles around the world, not simply in terms of homologous struggles around identity politics, but as the obverse sides of the same class struggle that cuts through various disposable communities and nations within the neoliberal global capitalist system. While many Palestinian artists, graffiti writers and activists have vociferously communicated the Palestinian narrative and voice to transnational audiences (Parry, 2010), Banksy and his partners supplement this activism, by opening up a new space for rethinking the egalitarian and emancipatory struggle for all.

The architectural parallax and the post-Oslo neoliberal capitalist regime

The Walled Off installation-hotel is a collaborative artistic-commercial project between the British street artist Banksy and his Palestinian ‘fixer’ and graffiti writer Wisam Salsa and other local partners. ⁴ The hotel opened on 3 March 2017 in Bethlehem, Palestine, inside a traditional multistoried building in Bethlehem that had been used to house a pottery shop on its first floor. The Walled Off hotel is located at a corner close to the northern entrance of the town of Bethlehem (Figure 1), a few hundred meters away from the Israeli checkpoint, which is locally known as Checkpoint 300, and just a few meters away the Israeli-built separation and annexation apartheid wall that snakes around the Bethlehem governorate in an Israeli-occupied area (Area A). ⁵ Hence, the installation-hotel was marketed as the hotel ‘with the worst view in the world’ (Graham-Harrison, 2017), since all the rooms in the hotel overlook the Israeli-built separation and annexation apartheid wall. As the hotel’s website ironically states, ‘graffiti-strewn concrete’ can be viewed ‘from almost every room’, adding that for the exhibitionist visitors, many of these rooms ‘are within the range of the army watchtower’.

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Figure 1.

A Google satellite map of the location of the Walled Off hotel.

Despite Banksy’s and his partners’ anti-colonial and anti-capitalist politics, they were accused of gentrification (Nassar, 2017), Pales-ploitation and war porn – that is, that it not only fetishizes and commodifies Palestinian suffering, but that it also normalizes the occupation (Muslemani, 2017). However, the Walled-Off has been embraced by the Palestinian public and officials as a central cultural heritage site and ‘an important national edifice’, in the words of the influential Palestinian public intellectual Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, where the ‘story of Palestine’ is told (Erakat, 2017). Many influential Palestinian artists have endorsed this project and supported it as well, by having their artwork displayed and put on sale in the hotel’s gallery.

Although the Walled-Off is increasingly framed within discourses of Palestinian nationalist ideology and identity politics, this installation-hotel functions in more radical emancipatory ways. The power of the Walled Off lies in its ability to inscribe what Žižek calls the ‘architectural parallax’, a term he borrows from Kojin Karatani and applies to the manifestation of the fundamental antagonism (class struggle) in modern architectural designs along the lines of Jameson’s (1981) notion of the ‘political unconscious’. For Žižek (2011), ‘architectural projects are answers to a problem which is ultimately socio-political’ (p. 246). He thus writes that the parallax gap in a building results from the ‘attempt to combine two incompatible structuring principles within the same building, as if two principles are locked in a struggle for hegemony’, adding that the critical task is ‘to conceive all possible positions as responses to a certain underlying deadlock or antagonism, as so many attempts to resolve this deadlock’ (Žižek, 2011: 245). In Lacanian terms, the deadlock is the impossible traumatic Real of the class struggle that is repressed in the formal structure of architectural design through the workings of official ideology, and the wide range of architectural designs are Imaginary and Symbolic solutions that aim to cover up this void which makes reality incomplete, but fail to do so.

The Walled Off hotel displays this parallax gap at the architectural level, by juxtaposing a traditional multistoried building with all the trappings of a contemporary boutique hotel cum art installation, a museum and a gallery together. While the hotel’s website celebrates tongue in cheek the unique hyperreal and simulated experience of ‘sleeping inside a work of art’, the ironic artworks as well as the collection of artifacts and objects that they gathered from manifestations of everyday life under occupation undermine this aestheticized fantasy. This is not an American motel where reality is commodified and presented as an unreal fantasy. Rather, the Walled Off introduces a parallax gap between the form (the leisurely activity of sleeping inside an artwork or experiencing reality as unreal) and the political content of the hotel-museum, in a way that discloses the unconscious neoliberal fantasy through which the Palestinian struggle for freedom has been coopted and framed to advance the interests of the Palestinian economic and political elites who work in cahoots with international donors and the Israeli occupation in the post-Oslo era (Haddad, 2016).

At the core of the hotel, moreover, Banksy installed a dysfunctional ‘out of service’ elevator, blocked and covered by bricks, that can be seen from the second floor inside the hotel section of the installation. These architectural elements juxtapose two contradictory ideological discourses – namely, the free international circulation of ideas and capital that made this boutique art hotel a popular touristic destination in the borderless world of the global neoliberal capitalist system, on the one hand, and the restrictions on the mobility of the Palestinians that are represented in the dysfunctional elevator inside the building on the other. This contradiction opens up the ‘parallax gap’ on which the fundamental antagonism can be encoded and played out in the space of the hotel.

The architectural parallax in the Walled Off hotel should be read in the context of the politico-economic contradictions that shape the realities in Palestine at this historical juncture within the neoliberal global capitalist system. First, Banksy’s installation-hotel draws attention to the realities of the Israeli military occupation and the Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine, by linking the installation-hotel to the centennial commemorations of the Balfour Declaration. Banksy himself issued a statement, in which he situated his installation in the British national debate not only about colonialism, but also about the Balfour declaration, in response to the British government’s national revisionist campaign to exonerate Balfour and the British government of any responsibility for the destruction of Palestinian society. He stated,

It’s exactly one hundred years since Britain took control of Palestine and started re-arranging the furniture – with chaotic results. I don’t know why but it felt like a good time to reflect on what happens when the United Kingdom makes a huge political decision without fully comprehending the consequences. (Sanchez, 2017)

Second, the Walled Off installation-hotel spot lights the Israeli-built separation and annexation apartheid wall, in particular, and the Palestinian struggle for freedom, in general, after it has been overshadowed by other disasters and atrocities in the region. Banksy (2006) had visited Bethlehem in 2005 where he spraypainted several works on Israel’s separation and annexation apartheid wall around the town (pp. 73; 136–145), in a clear anti-colonial statement against the ways in which the separation and annexation apartheid wall has turned Palestine, as Banksy himself stated, ‘into the world’s largest open-air prison’. Banksy’s work from this period and his second 2007 tour of Bethlehem has been credited with putting Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for freedom at the center of the international solidarity movement and the burgeoning tourist industry and fan subculture. Banksy thus became so much ‘bigger’ than Bethlehem’s iconic son (Jesus) in his birthplace that one of the local street artists was even convinced that there were ‘more Banksy tourists than Jesus tourists’ during those years.

Third, the project was designed to highlight the contradictions of the captive economy under occupation and its integration within the neoliberal global capitalist system in the post-Oslo era (Shabi, 2009). It might be argued that the Walled Off hotel interrogates and exposes the increasing polarization of wealth in the region and the role that the economic and political Palestinian elites play in the immiseration of wider segments of Palestinian society, by collaborating with their Israeli counterparts, international donors and the peace and state-building cottage industry (Haddad, 2016). On the one hand, these economic contradictions are clearly registered in the hotel’s name, which is a pun and play on the upscale and luxurious Waldorf Astoria hotels, one of which was established next door in Jerusalem in 2014. The hotel’s name can thus be considered a political statement par excellence about the polarization of wealth and the division of labor around the world and in the region. Moreover, in this context, the hotel draws attention to the socio-political effects of occu-tourism on the commodification of Palestinian suffering and oppression, within Banksy’s known anti-capitalist aesthetics and politics. The Walled Off hotel is meant to function as a parody and critique of the many occu-touristic commercial ventures and other forms of alternative tourism and entrepreneurial activities that have developed around the occupation and apartheid wall in Palestine (Isaac, 2013). The problem with these occu-tourism enterprises is that they have collapsed into staged spectacles for the entertainment of vacationing international travelers, who enjoy the adrenaline rush of confrontations with the Israeli military.

On the other hand, the hotel highlights the problem of unemployment and un-employability in the Palestinian economy after decades of alleged state-building in the post-Oslo era. Indeed, the hotel provides employment opportunities for the precariat Palestinian workforce which is struggling for a decent living under conditions of scarcity and disposability in the occupied Palestinian territories (Graham-Harrison, 2017). However, the hotel can offer only a limited number of jobs, pointing thus to the failure of the neoliberal dream of economic growth and false promise of prosperity that Palestinians were led to believe they would accomplish if they cooperated with their occupiers and guaranteed their safety, which Haddad (2016) refers to as ‘Palestine Ltd’. As they worked on reorganizing social relations in Palestine, international donors, Israel, the Palestinian economic and political elites and other actors collaborated to exacerbate the Palestinian state of indebtedness, unemployment, consumerism and independency (Haddad, 2016: 280).

Beyond particularity: the immanent universal dimension of Palestinian identity

Through its architectural parallax, Banksy’s Walled Off hotel makes an intervention into the deadlock of the current economic and political situation in Palestine, making it possible to reinvent Palestinian identity within the contradictions of the global capitalist system in a completely new grammar of radical emancipatory politics that acknowledges the immanent universal dimension of Palestinian identity. Devoid of the traditional symbols and insignia of Palestinian struggle, suffering and resistance (Harlow, 1987; Kanafani, 1982; Peteet, 1996), Banksy’s artwork does not fall into the trap of Western colonial appropriation and cooptation of the Palestinian narratives and symbols or silencing the voices of the colonized indigene. Rather than facilitating a ‘marriage’ between Palestinian art and global art in a way that elevates ‘both Palestinian and universal art’, as some commentators opined, the Walled Off valorizes the immanent universal dimension in every identity over the assertion of essentialist identities.

This move beyond particular identities is grounded in what Žižek calls ‘concrete universality’, that clears a space for revisiting the traditional signifiers of Palestinian identity and links the Palestinian struggle for freedom to other struggles around the fundamental antagonism. Concrete universality refers to the idea that there is no neutral or abstract universality and that every universality is colored by a particular content. In Hegel, as Žižek (2001) states, the universal coincides with the particular contents or concrete situations through which it can be ‘hegemonized’, while at the same time maintaining its universal frame in and through these concrete situations (p. 23). Žižek (2001) thus maintains that for Hegel, the particular content is not only a “subspecies of the universality of the total process, it also hegemonizes this very universality, transmuting universality itself into a part of (or, rather, drawn into) the particular content” (p. 23). As such, the universality is neither simply opposed to some concrete content or particular feature of the totality nor is caught up in the antagonisms of particular life worlds or ways of life.

Žižek draws two major conclusions from this Hegelian notion of concrete universality. First, he shows how concrete universality constitutes the grounds for rethinking identity politics, unraveling the imminent universal dimension in every particular identity. Žižek (2018, n.p.) writes,

‘Concrete universality’ means that there is no abstract universality of rules, there are no ‘typical’ situations, all we are dealing with is exceptions; however, a concrete totality is the totality that regulates the concrete context of exceptions. We should thus, on account of our very fidelity to concrete analysis, reject any form of nominalism. To the nominalist claim that there is no pure neutral universality, that every universality is caught up in the conflict of particular ways of life, one should reply: ‘No, today it’s the particular ways of life that do not exist as autonomous modes of historical existence, the only actual reality is that of the universal capitalist system’. This is why, in contrast to identity politics, which focuses on how each (ethnic, religious, sexual) group should be able fully to assert its particular identity, the much more difficult and radical task is to enable each group to access full universality. This access to universality does not mean a recognition that one is also part of the universal human genus, or the assertion of some ideological values that are considered universal. Rather, it means recognizing one’s own universality, the way it is at work in the fractures of one’s particular identity, as the ‘work of the negative’ that undermines every such identity. (Emphasis added)

For Žižek (2012), universality manifests itself through the gaps, failures and antagonisms at the heart of particular identities which not only destabilizes identity from within, but also serves as the foundation for an authentic emancipatory universality (p. 361). Briefly, Žižek maintains that every identity is split from within and is coincident with a gap that exists immanently at its core. Žižek’s crucial point here is that this split produces a gap or a destabilizing excess, ‘the work of the negative’, at the core of every identity, thwarting the possibility of forming any substantive particular content (identity). However, identities, which are misrecognized as self-enclosed and substantial, are prone to repress this universal dimension. Nonetheless, subjects should actualize the promise of this immanent universal dimension, by articulating and organizing the struggle for universal emancipation (the class struggle) ‘through or at the site of a thwarted particularity’ (Žižek, 2012: 362).

This does not mean that Žižek completely dismisses particular identities, but clearly rejects identity politics discourses, in which the particular content distorts the imminent universal dimension of identities. Rather, he seems to be concerned that the struggle for a particular form of difference becomes ‘nothing but a content that is necessarily distorted by its own attempt to fulfill the demand of its abstract universal’ (Vighi, 2006: 108). At stake here is his contention that the particular content of any identity can easily fill the empty space of universality. However, to paraphrase Žižek, the human subject will never succeed either in using any particular content to fill this universality or in bringing the particular content into harmonious relations with the universal, because there is a fundamental contradiction between its ‘singular subjective viewpoint’, through which it perceives and colors reality, and its status as another object in that reality.

Žižek discusses Malcolm X’s radical gesture as an exemplary case of this inherent universal core of identity. Malcolm X managed to substitute the nostalgia for precolonial African roots for an X, an ‘unknown new (lack of) identity’ that offered him the freedom to reinvent Black identity and demonstrate that it is ‘more universal than the professed universality of whites’ (Žižek, 2014: 132–133). Malcolm X understood that what White supremacists wanted to oppress and repress was not African cultural roots, but the same universal ideals that were embodied in his iconic X. Colonial history, according to Žižek, shows that colonialists were eager to revive about reviving precolonial cultural traditions that were brutally oppressive and unjust.

The conclusion to be drawn here, specifically in the case of postcolonial subjects, is that the truth of this subject, as Žižek provocatively argues, lies in its abstraction (incorporation into the global capitalist system) not in its concrete (cultural) content. Postcolonial critics, Žižek contends, assume that the truth of the postcolonial subject living in a globalized world is its cultural lifeworld, tradition, or way of life. Žižek (2011) refers to the Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s example of the Indian software programmer who represents the truth of the Indian lifeworld through his concrete (cultural) content such as rituals and so on (pp. 280–285). For Chakrabarty, this Indian programmer is a paradigmatic cipher of the unproblematic simultaneity or ‘normalized coexistence of the universality of modernization and of particular lifeworlds’. Žižek, however, correctly notes that ‘postmodernity is not the overcoming of modernity but its fulfillment: in the postmodern universe, pre-modern leftovers’ are no longer experienced as obstacles to be overcome by progress toward a fully secularized modernization, but as something to be unproblematically incorporated into the multicultural global universe – all traditions survive, but in a mediated ‘de-naturalized’ form, that is, no longer as authentic ways of life, but as freely chosen ‘life-styles’. In other words, within the totality of global capitalism, ‘elements of pre-existing lifeworlds and economies (including money) are gradually re-articulated as its own moments, “exapted” with a different function’ (Žižek, 2011: 284).

Banksy’s Walled Off hotel encodes this immanent universal dimension of Palestinian identity in the artwork assembled in the installation-hotel. He does not simply evacuate his art from the traditional symbols and insignia of Palestinian struggle, suffering and resistance, but places the few references he has to these Palestinian symbols within the larger intertextual system of ciphers, images and representations that typify his street art. These symbols and images thus circulate and constitute his aesthetic and semiotic system from one specific location to another around the world, making it impossible to form any substantive Palestinian particular content through these symbols and allowing for meaning and identities to be reinvented in a radically universal dimension.

Take, for example, the iconic symbol of Palestinian nationalism and resistance, the kuffiyeh, especially, the checkered or fishnet patterned black and white head gear: Banksy rarely uses this iconic Palestinian symbol in his artwork, substituting it for other classical riot symbols such as the bandana. On the southern wall of the hotel’s lobby, for instance, Banksy recycles his iconic mural, ‘Rage, the flower thrower’ (also known as ‘the flower bomber’), which he originally spray painted all over the eastern wall of a gas station in the town of Beit Sahour in 2005 in a tribute to the civil resistance movement. The image portrays a young man clad in traditional riot gear, including a bandana that covers the lower half of his face, with a baseball cap placed back-to-front over his head, and assuming a position to throw a flower bouquet at an unknown target. This larger than life mural is recycled in the Walled Off hotel in miniaturized size, of course, showing the young man’s torso in a tripartite frame on the southern wall of the lobby. The left-hand medium size frame includes the young man’s flower bouquet, the central larger frame presents his torso, accentuating his bandana-covered face and baseball cap, and the right-hand smaller frame depicts his left hand as he moves his arm in an abduction movement (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Replicas of ‘flower thrower’ and David (courtesy of the Walled Off hotel).

There is only one exception to Banksy’s use of the kuffiyeh, although it is used in complete contradistinction to its culturally invested meanings. In one of the hotel’s rooms, Banksy uses this symbol in his depiction of a pillow fight between an Israeli soldier in full gear and a Palestinian youth, donning civilian clothes with his face completely covered in a kuffiyeh – only his eyes are showing (Figure 3). This artwork does not trivialize Palestinian resistance, as some critics surmised, nor does it frame it in terms of moral equivalency and parity, or assert a kind of post-Holocaust ethics about the humanity of the colonized and the colonial Other who are sharing their humanity through playful games. Rather, the homosocial and intimate subtext of the pillow fight betrays the dialectic of involuntary participation and forced identification in such power games between persecutors and their victims. The most pertinent historical event, through which this artwork should be gauged is the infamous ‘death (soccer) match’ at Auschwitz, in which extermination camp inmates were forced to play soccer against SS guards (Sanyal, 2002).

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Figure 3.

Pillow fight (courtesy of the Walled Off hotel).

Adjacent to the ‘flower bomber’, in a niche in the western wall, Banksy mounted on a pedestal or column reminiscent of Roman or Greek architecture one of the most recurrent iconic images of the Palestinian struggle for freedom – Palestinian youth tackling tear gas, but again without appropriating any traditional symbols of the Palestinian struggle. In 2006, Banksy reworked Michelangelo’s classic statue David into a new sculptural replica titled, ‘Bullet-proof David’ (suicide bomber) for an exhibit at the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery. In this original piece, Banksy maintained the classical statue’s position, micro-penis and all, but covered his face with a bandana, placed a bullet-proof vest on his torso, and strapped the vest with dynamite, invoking the image of a suicide bomber. In the lobby of the Walled Off hotel, Banksy recycles this image but gets rid of any symbols of violence and terrorism. He simply mounts the bust of a Hellenized David, whose mouth is loosely covered with a piece of cloth that morbidly looks like a piece of a shroud rather than a bandana, and wraps the sculpture with the white fumes of a tear gas canister, which he places at the bottom of the work. While Michelangelo’s David became a symbol of the defense of civil liberties in the Republic of Florence (Levine, 1974), Banksy’s replica of David was first appropriated as a statement against fundamentalist terrorism and violence and was later reappropriated more along the biblical underdog master-narrative, the David that was ambivalently invested in both liberal and leftists discourses to either glorify Israel’s military power or Palestinian resistance.

Banksy’s explicit and implicit references to religious, political and cultural Jewish signifiers should be read in the context of recent attempts to appropriate the archetypal image of the suffering Jew in an effort to rehumanize the Palestinians. Zalloua (2019), for example, refers to a quote by the Palestinian postcolonial theorist Edward Said in which he calls himself ‘the last Jewish intellectual’, as an example of a ‘diasporic or exilic mode of critique’ through which solidarity can be conceived ‘as a form of radical relationality’ (p. 97). Although Zalloua is correctly interested in decoupling Jewishness from Zionism, he still reifies Jewishness as a metaphor for ‘negativity’ and the ‘power of subtraction’. As radical as Said’s gesture sounds to Zalloua, the more genuinely radical strategy would have been for Said to de-reify all identities and insist on the immanent universal dimension that exists at the core of both Jewish and Palestinian identities. In his writings about anti-Semitism, for example, Žižek (1989) argues that there is a supplement produced about the Jews that makes Jewishness different from itself, and that recognizes, in Žižek’s words, ‘what is in Jew more than Jew’ (p. 97). As such, any attempt to pin down the precise meaning of Jewishness will necessarily leave something out. Said’s and Zalloua’s problem, it could be argued, is that they substitute the universal dimension of Jewish identity for the particular content of the traditional signifiers of Jewishness, instead of insisting on their reciprocal universality.

What this amounts to, for Žižek, is nothing short of rejecting identity politics and redefining ‘the very universality of what it means to be human’. Speaking about the radical potential of feminism, Žižek suggests that feminists would not simply engage in inscribing a particular form of difference (i.e. gender or sexual difference) within the matrix of the dominant symbolic order. Rather, they would relate to themselves as already universal, clearing a space for interrogating and destabilizing the universal framework within which a troubling excess is foreclosed:

This is what you must be conscious of, that when you fight for your position, you at the same time fight for the universal frame of how your position will be perceived within this universal frame. This is for me, as every good feminist will tell you, the greatness of modern feminism. It’s not just we women want more. It’s we women want to redefine the very universality of what it means to be human. This is for me this modern notion of political struggle. (Emphasis added; qtd. in Pound, 2008: 113)

The concern with particular gender, racial or national difference would embody the exception, as long as the gendered, racialized or national subject seeks not to single out this particular difference and elevate it to the level of the (abstract and neutral) universal. The point instead is to appropriate the form of a certain particularity in order to interrogate and destabilize the very universal framework (i.e. multiculturalism and identity politics) within which this particular form of difference is posited. The point, in short, is to transform every struggle for a particular form of difference in a way that reveals the immanent universal dimension of every identity.

The fundamental antagonism and the universality of the Palestinian struggle

This recognition of the immanent dimension of universality in the reconstruction of particular cultural identities clears a space for opening up the second dimension of the Hegelian concrete universality, as Žižek states, by envisioning a common struggle and solidarity based on the experiences of those who have been excluded from the neoliberal global capitalist system. It is typical to ground international solidarity in the Palestinian context, by drawing parallels between and juxtaposing the Palestinian struggle for freedom with other struggles. Said (1996), for example, argues that it is not enough for international solidarity to

affirm that a people was dispossessed, oppressed or slaughtered, denied its rights and its political existence, without at the same time doing what Fanon did during the Algerian war, affiliating those horrors with the similar afflictions of other people. This does not at all mean a loss in historical specificity, but rather it guards against the possibility that a lesson learnt about oppression in one place will be forgotten or violated in another place or time. (p. 44)

However, identifying these struggles in terms of homological relations or equivalences does not necessarily produce conditions for universalizing the struggle in praxis. Many a time members of oppressed communities end up engaged in an Olympics for victimization, in which they deem their struggle as more important than the struggle of other groups. Instead, the Walled Off hotel universalizes the Palestinian struggle, by linking it to the struggles of other disposable communities in the global neoliberal capitalist system as the obverse sides of the same fundamental antagonism (class struggle). Both the Palestinian struggle and the experiences of other disposable communities around the world are seen as the byproducts of the contradictions of the neoliberal global capitalist system and its emergent apartheid regime. This, as Žižek (2011) states, introduces a ‘totally different universality, that of an antagonistic struggle which does not take place between particular communities, but splits from within each community, so that the “trans-cultural” link between communities is that of a shared struggle’ (p. 53).

This new solidarity politics is based on the interrogation of cultural limits and dis-identification from collective cultural identities. Žižek refers here to Susan Buck-Morss, who in her book on Hegel and Haiti perfectly captures this idea about the trans-cultural link at the core of radical solidarity politics. Buck-Morss (2009) writes,

Rather than giving multiple, distinct cultures equal due, whereby people are recognized as part of humanity indirectly through the mediation of collective cultural identities, human universality emerges in the historical event at the point of rupture. It is in the discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained to the breaking point give expression to a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits. And it is our emphatic identification with this raw, free, and vulnerable state, that we have a chance of understanding what they say. Common humanity exists in spite of culture and its differences. A person’s nonidentity with the collective allows for subterranean solidarities that have a chance of appealing to universal, moral sentiment, the source today of enthusiasm and hope. (p. 133)

As Buck-Morss intimates, these ‘subterranean solidarities’ acquire a special meaning in the context of the experiences of disposable and excluded communities within the new global apartheid regime that have to deal with existential breaking points.

In so far as they lack any determinate place in the hegemony of the neoliberal global capitalist regime, these excluded, disposable communities can be said to represent the symptomal truth of the system, its constitutive injustice and inequality. For Žižek, as he explains to Glyn Daly, this represents true universality: ‘ . . . when you have in a certain social totality those who are “below us” – the negated or outcast – then precisely insofar as they are the abject, they stand for universality’ (Žižek and Daly, 2004: 160). As such, these excluded, disposable communities constitute the ‘part of the no part’ of the system, its point of inherent exclusion or exception, in the allegedly democratic and egalitarian neoliberal global capitalist system. In the case of the proletariat, for example, Žižek writes that

an event proper occurs only when this symptomal point is fully assumed in its truth – say, when the proletariat grasps that its lack of a proper place within the social body signals that it stands for universality (universal truth) of the society in which there are proletarians.

This makes it possible for radical revolutionary politics to emerge, because it is from their perspective that a radical revolutionary project can be conceived and theorized now, making them the ‘very site of political universality’ (Žižek, 2014: 78). Consequently, radical revolutionary and solidarity projects can fully assume the repressed point of exclusion, in order to reconfigure the very coordinates and terms of universality. From this vantage point, it becomes possible to subvert the totality of the system, since the domain of politics proper is not simply about ‘the negotiation of interests but aims at something more, and starts to function as the metaphoric condensation of the global restructuring of the entire space’.

This is not to say that Žižek dismisses the important struggles against particular forms of oppression that are structured around secondary (visible) contradictions. What is crucial to keep in mind here is that the emphasis on the struggle against these secondary contradictions mystifies and displaces – even effaces – the fundamental antagonism, or the constitutive split, in the neocolonial global capitalist mode of production insofar as it constitutes the totality of social relations today. To this extent, the assertion of the concrete universality of specific forms of secondary contradictions can help distinguish the authentic emancipatory content of these struggles from its fake neoliberal form that will inevitably compromise it with the ideological logic of hegemonic neoliberal regime (Žižek, 2016: 98–100). As such Žižek (2012) insists, above all, on the need to fully assume the repressed point of exclusion as ‘the gap between the particular . . . and the universal which destabilizes it from within’, in order to reconfigure the very coordinates and terms of universality (p. 361).

Grounded in this understanding of universality, Banksy’s Walled Off hotel accomplishes two goals: First, it registers the second contradictions around the dystopian realities of the ethnic cleansing campaign underlying the Israeli military occupation and the Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine (Pappé, 2006), usually referred to as the Ongoing Nakba (Al-Nakba Al-Mostamera). Second, it aligns the Palestinian struggle for freedom with the struggle of other disposable communities as the obverse sides of the same fundamental antagonism. By highlighting temporal continuities in the colonial history of Palestine, the Walled Off hotel links the legacies of the British colonial mandate especially, the colonial gentlemen’s club and the Balfour declaration, to the Ongoing Nakba in Palestine under the Zionist settler-colonial project and its history of ethnic cleansing (a term that was used by Jewish terrorists and militias in 1948), occupation and apartheid. As Said (1992) demonstrates, establishing the genealogy of Zionism and its links and affinities to Western colonialism is important for examining Zionism as an institutional power structure and practice that aims at accumulation of wealth, land, power and ideological legitimacy as well as the displacement of people, other ideas and prior legitimacy (pp. 56–57).

In the parallax space of the Walled Off hotel, Banksy foregrounds this colonial genealogy and historical continuity between Britain’s imperial legacy and Zionist settler-colonialism in diverse ways. Outside the hotel, a doorman sporting a black top hat and a black overcoat as well as a butler monkey wearing a red waistcoat and a red fez welcome the visitors and guests. Inside, Banksy resituates the Ongoing Nakba in colonial history through the representation of the gentlemen’s club and the Balfour diorama that he deposited in the museum in the back of the lobby. A spectacular fetishized simulation of one of the legacies of colonial history, the gentlemen’s club features a mechanical piano, a tea room, a collection of classic Victorian and Royal family plate collection and three cherubs hanging from the wall wearing yellow oxygen masks. The gentlemen’s club replica in all its colonial glory offers an anti- or counter-narrative to the exotic nostalgia boom for the British Raj that has swept British public discourses and the media in the last few years (Jeffries, 2015). Moreover, in the specific Palestinian context, the idea of the gentlemen’s club itself invokes one of Tel Aviv’s boutique hotels, whose décor is supposed to be a throwback to a 1950s gentlemen’s club. This other boutique hotel, however, boasts a ‘stunning rooftop pool’ (Richards, 2015) (Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

Plan of the Walled Off hotel lobby (courtesy of the Walled Off hotel).

The gentlemen’s club serves an important function in the inscription of this colonial genealogy – it actually operates as the frame narrative, so to speak, for the hidden narrative of the colonial story-within-a-story of the Balfour Declaration. Past the gentlemen’s club and at the entrance to the museum in the parallax space of the Walled Off hotel, Banksy mounted the Balfour diorama. The display features a life-sized diorama of Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour signing the 1917 Balfour Declaration document in repetitive mechanical circles, symbolizing the ongoing cycles of violence and destruction that this document has visited on Palestinians. Banksy thus seems to suggest that the Balfour Declaration is the truth of the colonial spectacle of the gentlemen’s club and the Zionist settler-colonial project.

The hidden Balfour diorama is not the only object in the parallax space of the installation-hotel that links Britain’s colonial legacy to the current Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine. The western wall of the lobby is adorned with hunting CCTV camera mounts and a collection of slingshots as well as two criss-crossed sledge hammers, just above the royalty plate collection. Banksy successfully juxtaposes the technologically sophisticated surveillance system of the Israeli occupation and apartheid regime as well as the brute force of the sledge hammers with the primitive ‘weaponry’ that has functioned as an iconic symbol of Palestinian resistance. The threat of the surveillance cameras is heightened by the couple of drones that are hanging to the right of the trophy wall. To paraphrase Mahrouse (2016), this exhibit manages to shock people out of their ‘comfort with militarization and privatization of security services’ (p. 330) (Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

The CCTV Wall (courtesy of the Walled Off hotel).

As Banksy registers the genocidal aspects of the Zionist settler-colonial project and Israeli military occupation, he also links the Palestinian struggle for freedom to the struggles of other disposable communities around the same fundamental antagonism. At the entrance of the lobby on the left, Banksy constructed a fireplace that establishes a clear connection between the Palestinian struggle and the plight of the refugees as two sides of the same struggle (Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

The fireplace installation (courtesy of the Walled Off hotel).

At the bottom of the fireplace, Banksy piled heaps of rocks that could have been removed from the rubble of Palestinian homes demolished by the Israeli army and its bulldozers. Just above the fireplace, Banksy placed three paintings of a stormy ocean scene in which orange life jackets are seen scattered all over the beach and, in some paintings, shoes are seen strewn around. Under the paintings, the artist placed a small replica of a refugee boat. The beach is haunted by the absence of the refugees – in both scenes objects witness for the disaster. By placing these two scenes in a vertical relationship, Banksy shows that these two forms of struggle are the mirror images of the same struggle – they are not only the byproducts of the same global capitalist contradictions, but the obverse sides of the struggle against capitalist exploitation and hegemony. In so far as they lack any determinate place in the hegemony of the neoliberal global capitalist regime, these absent refugees and the Palestinians can be said to stand for the system’s point of inherent exclusion or exception, exposing the system in its structural inequality and injustice.

Banksy also embeds the struggle in Palestine to the struggle of the unemployed and unemployable in the neoliberal global capitalist economy. Behind the bar at the entrance of the lobby of the installation-hotel, there are three clocks marking the time in New York, London and Jerusalem, each of which features the image of the famous Banksy rat in the background (Figure 7). This is the same rat that was previously painted over in Palestine but that Banksy uses as his trademark in most of his street art in Bristol and other places. In their anarchic and libidinal energy, in Banksy’s philosophy, rats are the ultimate signifiers of the power of the excluded and disposable communities to represent the ugly truth of the global neoliberal capitalist system, its constitutive injustice and inequality from which they are excluded, even excremental (abject) subjects. In one of his memorable statements about the symbolic meaning of rats in his work, Banksy (2006) notes,

They exist without permission. They are hated, hunted and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilizations to their knees. If you are dirty, insignificant and unloved, then rats are the ultimate role model. (p. 95)

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Figure 7.

The rat clocks (courtesy of the Walled Off hotel).

These rats hold signs that say ‘Welcome to hell’ and ‘London doesn’t work’; they are not only the unemployed working class, but the increasing number of unemployable workers in the global neoliberal capitalist system in Britain as well as in Palestine. As they disclose the inherent contradictions and inconsistencies of the system, by virtue of their exclusion from the system itself, these disposable communities become a symptom of the systemic pathologies of the neoliberal global neoliberal capitalist system itself. Since these rats recognize their ‘worthless’ value and position in society (Banksy, 2006: 94), they are true revolutionaries. Echoing Percy Shelley’s utopian motto ‘Il buon tempo verra’ (the good time shall come), these rats declare ‘our time will come’ (Banksy, 2006: 183).

By universalizing the Palestinian struggle for freedom, Banksy adds another important dimension to the work that many Palestinian artists, graffiti writers and activists have done over the last few decades to share and communicate the Palestinian narrative with transnational audiences. He certainly does not overshadow them or cancel them out; rather, he communicates his message in collaboration and partnership with them. As such, they open up a new space for rethinking the egalitarian and emancipatory struggle for all. Žižek writes that ‘the construction of universals is a long process, a form of patient and infinite work which can only asymptotically approximate its goal’, and this is exactly the power of Banksy’s Walled Off hotel.