Matthew DeMaio, Handala and the Statue of Liberty, Bethlehem Wall . Courtesy of the photographer 

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... ̄n ̄ (d. 967), contemporary Arabic- language graffiti is less concerned with making sensational claims and more interested in representing everyday life. 31 Among the many mediations through which Palestinian suffering is represented, allegory, the representational mode best suited for injustices that cannot be rendered transparently, plays a prominent role. The year 2005, three years after the beginning of the wall’s construction, saw the first major exhibit of art about the wall. Comprised of the work of artists from Ramallah, Tel Aviv, and New York, the exhibit called itself “Three Cities against the Wall” ( Thala ̄th mudun d . idda al- jida ̄ r ). 32 Echoing the contrasts adduced here between globalized Anglophone graffiti and localized graffiti in Arabic, one of the exhibit’s organizers remarked on the different emphases evident in the contributions of Palestinian as compared to American artists. The contributions of the American artists were as a rule “straightforward” and laden with “clear statements against the wall” to the extent that “several pieces appeared to be demonstrat- ing the artist’s duty to convince the viewer that the wall really exists.” “Seen through Middle Eastern eyes,” these didactic artifacts appeared “almost banal.” 33 By contrast, Palestinian artists avoided representing the wall as such: “most of their works were abstract and expressionist . . . and expressed Palestinian culture [rather than making] a direct political statement.” 34 If history repeats itself as tragedy for tourists who come to gaze on the apartheid wall, it repeats itself as satire, farce, and allegory for the local Palestinian population. Those who simultaneously occupy internal and external cognitive spaces, for example, Palestinian- American artists, are most skillful at blending the invasive textures of military rule with the everyday aspects of the occupation. In an essay prefacing her creative work in connection with the wall, Palestinian- American artist D ̄n ̄ c Ar ̄q ̄t recalls observing a mother waiting at a checkpoint in Jericho as she cuddled her infant to her chest. Turning away from the political illusions fostered by George W. Bush’s ill- fated “road map for peace,” c Ar ̄q ̄t writes, “at a time when the Road Map [ khar ̄t . eh al- sala ̄ m ] is being redefined by walls, barriers, and destruction, the human body and mind is made to adapt to the various borders crossing through it.” 35 The interface between a global political con- sciousness and Palestinian everyday life is here focalized by the artist’s eye. Decades before the construction of the wall began, a Palestinian cartoonist created a figure who would later come to epitomize its meaning. Assassinated in London in 1987 due to the controversy stirred by his art, N ̄j ̄ al- c Al ̄ is most famous for creating the cartoon character Handhala, a boy whose name references a bitter gourd with deep roots. 36 Never allowed to age by his creator, Handhala remained an icon of the author’s childhood self. Handhala is frozen in time at the age of ten, the same age when his creator was forcibly relocated to a refugee camp in Lebanon. Handhala’s hands are “always clasped behind his back,” N ̄j ̄ al- c Al ̄ explains, “as a sign of rejection at a time when solutions are presented to us the American way.” 37 “Omnipresent in the camps during the intifada, drawn by students in their notebooks, spray- painted on walls and worn as necklaces or carried as key chains,” Handhala is repeatedly mobilized as a symbol of resistance in Arabic graffiti. 38 Echoing Peteet’s observations regarding the paraphernalia of resistance during the first intifada, Laleh Khalili notes that Handhala joined “the keffiyeh , photographs of archetypal martyrs, [and] the forbidden colors of the flag worn in defiance” as one of the “everyday acts of resistance whose accumulation shaped the contours of the Intifada alongside more visible acts of collective mobilization such as demonstrations or strikes.” 39 More recently, the Egyptian artist Fawzia Reda turned to Handhala for her contribution to the “Three Cities against the Wall” exhibition. Commenting on her own art, Reda reflected on the significance of N ̄j ̄ al- c Al ̄’s brainchild, Handhala, who stood “as a quiet witness to the suffering and dignity of the Palestinian people.” For Reda, Handhala reflects “the persistence of a political conscience” by giving “the Wall and the figure, both, binding value and consequence.” 40 Handhala is represented twice on the section of the Bethlehem wall that begins with Hazboun’s Bahamas Seafood Restaurant and ends on the edge of Bethlehem’s city limits. (One of the most heavily polluted stretches of the wall and beset with barbed wire, the section also offers one of the richest canvases in all of Bethlehem.) The first carries an English caption that ironically compares the gentle Handhala with a militant army: “Naji al- c Ali brigade 2010.” The second even more striking image (figure 3) consists of a postmodern Pietà, featuring Handhala as Jesus and Mary as a pale- green Statue of Liberty, an obvious symbol of a foreclosed American dream. The Statue of Liberty embraces her suffering son, who wears a crown of thorns. Handhala’s back as always faces the viewer. While these images are globally implicated through their Christian and American symbolism, they nonetheless succeed in powerfully evoking the Palestinian experience of occupation. The contrast adduced so far has been primarily between English graffiti that, while radiating a simulacrum of transparency, is overdetermined by its many layers of reception, and Arabic graffiti that, while enmeshed in the language of allegory, intimately renders the experience of Palestinian suffering. This distinction, which exists in the form of a continuum rather than as an absolute opposition, generates a paradox: graffiti in English tend to be more overtly politicized than graffiti in Arabic, which utilizes the arts of indirection. It is as though the intifada has become tired of itself, weary of mobilization, and skeptical of the very possibility of change. Meanwhile, Palestine’s international supporters have taken to addressing constituencies far removed from the theaters of Palestinian suffering for the sake of building transnational solidarity. Reflecting bleakly on the aestheticization of Palestinian suffering enacted by foreign artists who incorporate the wall into their art, Roneh Eidelman observes that the wall can only be “attractive for artists who do not have to live with its results.” When they aestheticize the wall that cuts through their daily lives, Palestinian artists do not fetishize it in the way that foreigners do, because, according to Eidelman, “the reality of the wall can only be sexy for artists not affected.” 41 Even though the distinctions between participant/observer and insider/outsider often dissolve when the art on the wall is absorbed and recontextualized in unpredictable ways by Palestinian observers, the aesthetics of international activism was frequently contrasted to the aesthetics of everyday life in my conversations with local Palestinians. “You are one of the lucky ones,” a resident from the neighboring village of Beit Jala said to me one day toward the end of my Bethlehem sojourn in 2012, “you can come and go as you please, observing how we live, and then leave. You see the wall, but you do not have to live with it every day.” The politically oriented Arabic graffiti of the first intifada existed in the same relation to the Palestinian walls examined by Peteet as global English today does to the apartheid wall that bisects Palestinian land, bearing the unmistakable imprint of a foreign occupying power. Whereas Palestinian- built walls inspired Arabic graffiti during the first intifada, Israeli- built barriers are more likely today to evoke only silence in Palestinians or, alternately, exasperation. The vast majority of canvases that cover the apartheid wall are the work of foreign artists and activists from outside Palestine, who address their slogans to an international arena wherein Palestine figures as only one theater among many global injustices. Thus has representation — the rendering up of the world as a picture of itself—complicated the ascription of agency within the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. As Heidegger already predicted in his diagnosis of Germany on the brink of the Shoah, representation in the age of the world picture follows the circuits of global capital. The form if not the substance of images is controlled by the state that provides the media for their inscription. Writing in the mid- 1990s and spurred by the example of Northern Ireland, Peteet forecasted the intifada’s success. It appeared at the time to her that fate had decreed the intifada’s eventual victory. By contrast, the graffiti of the postintifada apartheid wall, erected in the wake of the intifada’s defeat, is fraught with silence and allegory, as it mutely bears witness to what exceeds representation. This is not to say that the graffiti of resistance have vanished any more than have the political movements that underwrote political mobilization, but merely that these art forms have gone underground, to spaces where English is not spoken and where local idioms resist translation. Taking translation as a general para- digm for the representation of suffering, the inscriptions on Palestine’s apartheid wall suggest that resistance is that which evades representation. To rephrase this point in terms put forth by Bruno Latour — and also to explain the hold of the unrepresentable on our imaginations—“whatever resists is real.” 42 Latour’s apothegm is kindred in spirit to the “existence is resistance” mantra that resonates in so many Palestinian spaces as well as in many Palestinian imaginations (the translator in the Balata refugee camp being a case in point). Theorists of translation have long studied how the rendering ...