The lobby leads to a museum that is probably the most comprehensive ever to document Israel's various methods of colonization and control over Palestinians, and their history of resistance.
At its entrance sits a dummy of Lord Balfour, the foreign secretary who 101 years ago initiated Britain's sponsorship of Palestine's colonization. He issued the infamous Balfour Declaration promising the Palestinians' homeland to the Jewish people. Press a button and Balfour jerks into life to furiously sign the declaration on his desk. Upstairs is a large gallery exhibiting some of the best of Palestinian art, and the hotel reception organizes twice-daily tours of the wall.
Entry to the rooms is hidden behind a secret door, disguised as a bookcase. Guests need to wave a room key, shaped like a section of the wall, in front of a small statue of Venus that makes her breasts glow red and the door open.
A stairway leads to the second and third floors, where the landings are decorated with more fading colonial splendor and Banksy art. Kitsch paintings of boats, landscapes and vases of flowers are hidden behind tight metal gauze of the kind Israel uses to protect its military Jeeps from stone-throwers.
A permanent "Sorry -- out of service" sign hangs from a lift, its half-open doors revealing that it is, in fact, walled up.
No mementosAlthough the rooms are designed thematically by Banksy, only a few contain original artworks, most significantly in the Presidential Suite.
Hotels may be used to customers taking shampoos and soaps, even the odd towel, as mementos of their stay. But at the Walled Off, the stakes are a little higher. Guests are issued with an inventory they must sign on departing, declaring that they have not pilfered any art from their room. But it is the wall itself that is the dominant presence, towering over guests as they come and go, trapping them in a narrow space between the hotel entrance and an expanse of solid grey.
A proportion visit the neighboring graffiti shop, Wall Mart, where they can get help on how to leave their mark on the concrete. Most of the casual graffiti is short-lived, with space regularly cleared so that new visitors can scrawl their messages and use art as a tool of resistance.
Protest piecesBanksy's better-known artworks, however, are saved from the spray-paint pandemonium elsewhere.
The crowbar-armed cherubs he brought to London were painted in time for Christmas last year, when he recruited film director Danny Boyle -- of Slumdog Millionaire fame -- to stage an alternative nativity play for local families in the hotel car park. The "Alternativity", featuring a real donkey and real snow produced by a machine on the Walled Off's roof, became a BBC documentary. Banksy had once again found a way to persuade prime-time TV to shine a light on Israel's oppressive wall.
Another artwork is his "Er sorry", a leftover from the Walled Off's "apologetic street party" of November last year, marking the centenary of the Balfour Declaration's signing. Children from two neighboring refugee camps were invited to wear Union-Jack crash helmets and wave charred British flags. A person dressed as Queen Elizabeth II unveiled "Er Sorry" stenciled into the wall. It served both as a hesitant apology on behalf of Britain and as a play on the initials of the Queen's official Latin title, Elizabeth Regina.
The event, however, illustrated that Banksy's subversive message, directed chiefly at western audiences, does not always translate well to sections of the local Palestinian population. The party was hijacked by local activists who stuck a Palestinian flag into the Union Jack-adorned cake and chanted "Free Palestine".
Is this 'war tourism'?Salsa outright rejects claims from some locals and foreign critics that the hotel is exploiting Palestinian misery and is an example of "war tourism".
He points out: "The Balfour party got the media interested in a story they probably would not have covered otherwise, because it lacked violence and bloodshed."
He adds that the area of Bethlehem in which the Walled Off is located would have been killed off by the wall were it not for Banksy investing his own money and time in the project. As well as the staff, it has brought work to tour guides, taxi drivers, neighboring and cheaper hotels, shops and petrol stations. "That is a very important form of resistance," he says.
It is also a rare example of Palestinians reclaiming land from the Israeli army. On the other side of the wall there had been a large army camp until the hotel started drawing significant numbers of visitors.
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