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Architectural parallax, neoliberal politics and the universality of the Palestinian struggle: Banksy’s Walled Off hotel

This article argues that Banksy’s new controversial project, the Walled Off installation-hotel, in Bethlehem, Palestine, can be productively interrogated in terms of what the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek calls the ‘architectural parallax’, as a site where the fundamental antagonism (the class struggle) in the context of the Palestinian struggle for freedom is played out. Structured around a few major architectural contradictions, Banksy’s new project in Bethlehem raises critical questions about the contradictions of post-Oslo Palestine within the neoliberal economic realities of the global capitalist system. The Walled Off hotel thus exposes the contradictions or ideological discrepancy between, on the one hand, the free mobility of ideas and capital which made such an installation-hotel possible in the first place, and on the other, the restrictions on the mobility of Palestinians under Israeli military occupation and Zionist settler-colonial regime. As an architectural parallax, Banksy’s Walled Off hotel inscribes the Palestinian struggle for freedom within a radical egalitarian dimension, that Žižek refers to after Hegel as ‘concrete universality’. This allows first, for recognizing the immanent universal dimension at the core of Palestinian particular identity. Second, it makes it possible to link the Palestinian struggle for freedom to other struggles around the world not simply by drawing parallels between them around identity politics, but as the obverse sides of the same class struggle that cuts through various disposable communities and nations within the neoliberal global capitalist system.