07-25-2013 Graffiti tour of Jerusalem

From the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz: http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/jerusalem-vivendi/.premium-1.537893

JERUSALEM VIVENDI

by Ilene Prusher

July 25, 2013

Marisa James show tour participants a stenciled graffito made to look like a Hebrew death notice, announcing

the death of a Gazan infant. Photo by Melanie Williams.

If you want to know what Jerusalemites are thinking, the writing is on the wall. Not the Western Wall - that contested holy site being fought over on a monthly basis. Not the beautiful Old City walls, and not the ugly wall that snakes around East Jerusalem and is known in official Israeli parlance as the “separation fence.”

However, that last wall is one of the subjects of the political graffiti that dots the walls of downtown Jerusalem, along with many of the other controversial issues of the day. Most Jerusalemites, including this one, simply walk by the seemingly cryptic messages without a second glance. But Marisa James, a 36-year-old American rabbinical student and human-rights activist originally from Connecticut, came to realize that taking a closer read of the writing on Jerusalem's walls was equally, if not more, informative as reading the op-ed pages.

James leads a two-hour walking tour, starting near the Russian Compound outside the ultra-hip Uganda Bar on Aristobolus Street, so narrow that any outsider would likely call it an alleyway. Here she points out an image of what looks like falling dominos that become the aforementioned separation fence with an Israel Defense Forces watchtower overhead, and then the words “Uhti, tahrimi” – an Arabic-Hebrew mixture meaning “Sister, boycott.” Another stencil evinces the suffering on both sides of the conflict, reading, “In Gaza and Sderot, Girls Just Wanna Live.” Yet another states, with a kind of cynical ennui, “Occupation, that’s so 90s.”

Virtually all of the graffiti is in Hebrew, and done with stencils for easy repetition around town. In some cases, it gets repeated widely, in a kind of urban awareness campaign. One that has been widely copied, for example, simply reads “Firing Zone 918.” It refers to an area in the South Hebron Hills that the IDF has declared as a future shooting practice zone. As such, the army has tried to move about 1,000 Palestinians out of the area (B’tselem recently ran a campaign raising attention about the matter). In another campaign – one that sprouted up as an outgrowth of the social justice movement of 2011 – graffiti with a ghost and the words “Beit Reik” (“Empty House”) was painted on unoccupied houses and apartments, protesting the presence of luxury homes owned by wealthy people who live abroad for most of the year.

Subversive and sublime

With her flowery dress, conservatively cut hair glimmering with streaks of early gray and her all-American blue eyes and freckles, James doesn’t look like someone you’d expect to know the ins and outs of the most subversive and sublime messages to be emblazoned across the walls of the holy city. But after five years of living here – during which she’s improved her Hebrew, engaged in Jewish studies as part of her ordination program at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia, and worked with T’ruah (formerly Rabbis for Human Rights-North America) – she found herself fascinated by Jerusalem’s graffiti, and made it her mission to document and decipher it.

T’ruah sponsors the tour and the pamphlet that participants receive as part of it, and hopes to continue the trail blazed by James, who will soon return to the U.S. to finish her rabbinical studies.

Those who missed her eye-opening tours can get a window into the scene on the Street Art Jerusalem Facebook page, where James suggests posting photos of graffiti that intrigues yet also baffles you, crowdsourcing-style.

Indeed, many a graffito requires layers of interpretation. Besides translating them for an English-speaking audience during the tour, James also tries to explain the use of Hebrew puns, the constant gender-bending in a very gender-specific language, and references to everything from the bible to modern poetry. She points out the stenciled words “hadarat nashim” – the exclusion of women, a hot issue in the 18 months since Israel had its own “Rosa Parks moment” in the form of a woman named Tanya Rosenblit refusing to go to the back of the bus. James shows how, with the addition of an “aleph” in the first word, the catchphrase becomes the “glorification of women” instead, in a pro-feminist message.

This week’s crowd is an interesting mix of young Americans – Reform rabbinical students and students from the Palestine Summer Encounter, a language plus home-stay in Bethlehem offered through the Holy Land Trust. The group follows James down some of the graffiti-embellished alleys into more prominent spaces, such as a wall on Jaffa Road, not far from the mayor’s official office. A black-on-white stencil there is made to look like one of the death notices that go up when someone has passed away in the neighborhood, serving as an invitation to visit the shivah (the week-long period of Jewish mourning). But this one reads: “Haneen Tafesh: 10 months old at her death, Gaza 2012.”

Taylor Johnson is a student from California. She came to Jerusalem from Bethlehem to do the graffiti tour, and is impressed. “There’s a lot going on here, but I wouldn’t have been able to figure any of it out on my own,” she says. “The way they use poetry and cultural references to talk about political matters is something that’s fascinating to me, and I don’t see that so much where I’m from.”

Word of the Prophets

As James leads the crowd down to Nahalat Shiva, she arrives at a whitewashed gate. Her jaw drops. “Oh no!” she exclaims. “This was one of my favorite walls in Jerusalem. It was covered with beautiful graffiti two weeks ago. I’m so sad.”

In other places, she gently peels back flyers advertising bands and exhibitions to show the graffiti below. Here a piece of a Yehuda Amichai poetry; there a fragment of verse from the bible. Here it’s Numbers 13:32, in which the spies sent to scope out the Land of Israel called it “a land that eats its inhabitants.” Ezekiel’s prophesy plays on that haunting imagery, promising that, one day, it will no longer be a land that devours its men.

“The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls,” Paul Simon wrote in “The Sounds of Silence.” Jerusalem has no underground, and so the messages are above ground and everywhere. Between trendy clothing boutiques there are stencils not just with words but faces: of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (along with a message reading, “He who believes in him is afraid”) and of Samer Issawi, a Palestinian prisoner who nearly died as the result of a long hunger strike.

Some of the graffiti is lighter, almost inspiring. A “word of the day” campaign offers words in Arabic translated and transliterated into Hebrew. Words that have appeared include hope, love and revolution. One message reads, “It’s okay, it’s okay” and another, “Iranians” inside a heart. And finally, James’ favorite: “We are not alone.”

If you look closely, you might also notice an interesting image: an ostrich with its head buried in the sand. By the time the tour is over, James will have made sure that this isn’t you.

Link to Facebook page on street art images in Jerusalem: https://www.facebook.com/StreetArtJerusalem