Rachel's Tomb Mural, Bet Lehem, Palestine 2017
Large-scale mural seeking a way to represent work created by locals, as opposed to foreigners, on the apartheid walls. Developed in collaboration with local activist and alternative tour guide Salah Abu Laban. The mural highlights the Tomb of Rachel, an Ottoman-era mosque from 1560. It was left behind the wall that went up after the Aqsa intifada in 2000. The mosque was then turned into a synagogue.
Shortly after completing the mural, the Walled Off Banksy Hotel opened to much international media attention, unbeknownst to us as we painted through tear gas and disturbances. The media attention helps highlight the continuing conflict.
Artwork Images
Why the wall is there
Rachel’s Tomb, situated at the northern entrance to Bethlehem, is enshrined in religious tradition and contested politics. It lies immediately adjacent to the Israeli separation barrier; the tomb has effectively been annexed behind concrete walls, barbed wire, guard towers, and restricted access corridors.
The barrier was extended in 2005 to envelop the tomb, pulling the site into the “Jerusalem Security Envelope” and transforming what had been a site of pilgrimage into a militarised enclave. Palestinians now face severe constraints on movement, prayer, and visitation. The wall around Rachel’s Tomb is not neutral infrastructure. It is a physical manifestation of exclusion, control, and the denial of shared heritage.
Over time, the wall has devastated the urban fabric around the tomb. Shops have shuttered. The route once bustling with pilgrims and neighbourhood life has grown desolate under surveillance and separation.
Effects & Human Cost
Restricted access and exclusion: Many Palestinians can no longer enter or approach Rachel’s Tomb, even though the site has deep significance across faiths.
Erasure of communal presence: The wall’s presence severs the daily spatial connection people once had to the site. It rewrites the relationship between memory, pilgrimage, and territorial belonging.
Militarisation of sacred space: The tomb’s enclosure under military control turns a symbol of spiritual mourning and maternal intercession into part of a security complex.
Cultural layering and conflict over representation: The wall itself bears layers of graffiti, inscriptions, and images — some made with local consent, many imposed by outsiders. That visual layer becomes contested territory.
Process images
My Process: With and For Palestinians
When we set out to create Rachel’s Tomb (mural), I sought collaboration, dialogue, and respect with the local community. This was not an outsider’s “intervention” but a joint act of witnessing and re-imagining.
Listening and mapping
I began by speaking with residents about what Rachel’s Tomb meant for them: as memory, suffering, spirituality, division, presence. Those conversations shaped my visual language: fragments of architecture, abstract colour fields, gesture, traces of inscription.
Co-design and participation
Along with Salah who worked alongside me, contributing motifs, marks, ideas and textures. Their presence in the painting process was central: their hands, voices, and decisions are woven into the final surface.
Site negotiation and integrity
Because the wall is guarded and controlled, access required negotiation and high risk. Every decision about where to paint, how visible it would be, when to work, had to account for safety, respect, and local consent. Any chance of a body part being seen over the wall would be subject to immediate sniper shot.
Reflective layers and changeability
The mural was conceived not as a fixed image but a layered surface: new markings, textual fragments, additions over time. This approach mirrors how memory and grief evolve, how communities respond to ongoing constraints.
Graffiti, Consent & Visual Authority
One of the acute tensions in walls like the one around Rachel’s Tomb is who gets to mark it. Graffiti is often understood as a form of resistance, claiming space. But when that graffiti is imposed without local voice, without consent, without community context, it replicates the very dynamics of erasure and appropriation the wall enforces.
In many contested regions, outside groups—tourists, activists, ideologues—spray slogans or images without local consultation. These acts can disrespect the lived experience of local people, overwrite local memory, and flatten complexity into spectacle.
My mural pushes against that impulse. It insists that any mark on the wall must come from those to whom the wall already belongs — those whose lives are shaped by it. It resists the idea of the “heroic spraycan outsider” and instead treats the wall as a fragile palimpsest of trauma, hope, and care. Sadly weeks after the mural was created an Australian graffiti artist stenciled a helicopter bombing the mosque to the real sadness of the locals.
What the Mural Does
Reclaims visibility: It gives visual presence to Palestinians denied access, making their narrative legible to passersby.
Counters erasure: By painting with respect and local agency, it contests the blankness or militarised façade of the wall.
Invites reflection, not propaganda: It is not a slogan but a space for quiet contemplation, complicity, memory, and human connection.
Questions authorship: Because it was made in collaboration, the mural refuses a single “authoritative voice” over a contested frontier.