(This article was amended on 19/04/20 per the author’s request)
There’s a poster that I see quite a lot around Amman. It’s a hand-drawn picture of Jerusalem. In big capital letters at the bottom it reads ‘Visit Palestine’. The irony is that, for most Jordanians, visiting Palestine is not so easy. But I’m a white woman with a British passport. I can visit Palestine without a second thought.
A few months ago, I took advantage of this and visited Palestine. I visited two Palestinian cities during my stay: Bethlehem and Ramallah, the latter being the de facto Palestinian capital. In Bethlehem, there’s a wall which the Israeli government calls the West Bank Barrier. When it is finished, it will stretch 700km along the Israeli-West Bank border. It is justified as an Israeli security precaution and at parts it reaches eight metres high and is topped with barbed wire.
In my ignorance, I didn’t really see the point in visiting the wall – a wall is a wall, I thought, and I’ve already seen it. What I was unaware of was that the wall in Bethlehem, as in many Palestinian cities, has become a space for activism – a space where people rebel against a government that has denied them worth and stripped them of dignity. The wall has a clear purpose, which is to involve the world in the struggle for equality.
The target audience is the tourists who are herded in by European tour companies and then herded back out, their heads full of the history, weeping for Christ’s sacrifice, turning a blind eye to the present injustice.
In Ramallah, unlike Bethlehem, it feels almost possible to forget the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Bethlehem, Palestine feels like a courageous rebel group, but in Ramallah, Palestine feels like a state. It is very pretty. There are trees and the air feels clean. There are nice houses, parks for children, and even mansions and shiny cars. But you don’t have to scratch far beneath the surface to find the pain. I stopped in a playground. Like many British playgrounds, the walls were painted with murals. But instead of happy images of animals and flowers, there was a painting of a dead baby. On top of this, the emptiness of the place was striking. There were no children in the park, and further out the streets were deserted.
Apparently the streets weren’t usually this quiet, but the people here are still recovering from the recent attacks in Gaza. Events like that take their toll on the West Bank, too, and it takes a while for life to return to normal. As you go further out of the centre, you will find the refugee camps, in which approximately 30,000 people live, without homes and in danger of being without futures and without hope.
The life of the ‘Visit Palestine’ poster began with the pencil of a Jewish refugee fleeing Nazi Germany. He was expressing his longing for a homeland free from prejudice and fear. Now, in very different circumstances, Palestinians use the poster to encourage people to understand the present conflict. The circumstances in which the poster’s artist fled his homeland and the current Palestinian conflict are not the same – I don’t want to suggest that there is a simple equivalent to be made. What I do see is some hope in this unlikely transition of a poster from one cause to another.
That people of different backgrounds and faiths, speaking different languages and living in different eras, have come to use the same symbol to express a desire for safety and security, reminds us that we are not so different from one another as we might sometimes thing. That, whatever our differences, we are all human.
