Palestine Is Not a Drawing Board: Defacing the Street Art on the Israeli Separation Wall

Unraveling the entanglements of fetish and secrecy bound up in the graffiti on the Palestinian face of the Israeli Separation Wall, this article analyzes the proliferation of defacements of the Australian street artist LushSux’s meme-graffiti on that wall in Bethlehem. In visually tracing and analyzing these successive moments of defacement, this article ethnographically captures a popular performance of collective Palestinian sovereignty within the borderlands of the Israeli Separation Wall. Celebrating defacement’s generative power to create a new face, this article demonstrates how defacement was an assertive act of unmasking the raw power of Israel’s colonial project.