Importantly, the hotel was also in one of the few areas of Bethlehem inside "Area C", parts of the West Bank classified in the temporary Oslo Accords as under full Israeli control. That meant the army could not bar Israelis from visiting. "Nowadays there are no channels open between Palestinians and Israelis. So The Walled Off Hotel is a rare space where Israelis can visit and taste the reality lived by Palestinians.
"True, Israelis mostly come to see the art. But they can't help but learn a lot more while they are here."
Salsa is happy that the Walled Off Hotel provides a good salary to 45 local employees and their families. His hope in setting up the hotel was to "encourage more tourists to stay in Bethlehem and for them to hear our story, our voice".
But Banksy's grander vision had been fully vindicated, he says. "The Walled Off Hotel gives tourists an experience of our reality.
"But it also emphasizes other, creative ways to struggle and speak up. It offers art as a model of resistance.
"The hotel magnifies the Palestinian's voice. And it makes the world hear us in a way that doesn't depend on either us or the Israelis suffering more casualties."
Global impactThe hotel's continuing impact was underscored last month when it featured for the first time at the Palestinian stand at the annual World Travel Market in London, the largest tourism trade show in the world. The event attracts 50,000 travel agents, who conduct more than $4 billion in deals over the course of the show.
Banksy had announced beforehand that he would bring a replica of one of his artworks on the wall just outside the Bethlehem hotel: cherubs trying to pry open two concrete slabs with a crowbar. He also promised a limited-edition poster showing children using one of Israel's military watchtowers as a fairground ride. A slogan underneath reads: "Visit historic Palestine. The Israeli army liked it so much they never left!" As a result, there was a stampede to the Palestinian stand, one of the smallest, that caught the show's organizers by surprise.
Rula Maayah, the Palestinian tourism minister, praised Banksy for changing the image of Palestinian tourism by diverting younger people into the West Bank, often during a visit to Israel. "He promotes Palestine and focuses on the occupation, but at the same time he is talking about the beauty of Palestine," she said.
At the Walled Off Hotel, however, Israel has made it much harder to see the beauty. Most windows provide little more than a view of the wall, which dwarfs in both height and length the Berlin Wall to which it is most often compared. That is all part of the Walled Off "experience" that now attracts not only wealthier visitors keen to stay in one the hotel's rooms, but a much larger audience of day trippers.
So successful has the Walled Off Hotel proved in such a short space of time that even some locals concede it upstages the Church of the Nativity -- at least for a proportion of visitors. A local taxi driver who was guiding two French sisters along the wall outside the hotel said many independent tourists now prioritized it ahead of the church.
Only wanting to be identified as Nasser, he said: "We may not know who Banksy is, but the truth is, he has done us a huge favor with this hotel and his art."
Sanctuary in a police stateIf Dismaland created a dystopian amusement park in the midst of a fun-filled seaside resort, the Walled Off Hotel offers a small sanctuary of serenity -- even if a politically charged one -- in surroundings that look more like a post-apocalyptic police state.
Along the top of the wall, there are innumerable surveillance cameras, as well as looming watchtowers, where ever-present Israeli soldiers remain out of view behind darkened glass. They can emerge unexpectedly, usually to make raids on the homes of unsuspecting Palestinians.
When I made a trip to the Walled Off in October, I parked outside to find half a dozen armed Israeli soldiers on top of the hotel's flat roof. When one waved to me, I was left wondering whether I had been caught up in another of Banksy's famous art stunts. I hadn't. They were real -- there to watch over Jewish extremists celebrating a religious holiday nearby at Rachel's Tomb.
The hotel's lobby, though not the rooms, are readily accessible to the public. It is conceived as a puzzling mixture: part cheeky homage to the contrived gentility of British colonial life, part chaotic exhibition space for Banksy's subversive street art. Visitors can enjoy a British cream tea, served in the finest china, sitting under a number of Israeli surveillance cameras wall-mounted like hunting trophies or alongside a portrait of Jesus with the red dot of a marksman's laser-beam on his forehead.
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