In a narrow, thronged street in the Old City of Jerusalem, the flow of the crowd was interrupted by one young tourist who stopped to snap photos of an old-style barbershop. The silver-haired barber was not amused.
"You want to take my picture, you ask me first! F--- you!" he bellowed, not taking his eyes off his work.
You could see where the tourist went wrong: the street, like many of the main thoroughfares in the Old City, is brimming with souvenir shops offering religious knick-knacks: wooden camels; T-shirts; confectionery; crucifixes. A throng of tourists stroll through the town or follow tour guides through the picturesque alleyways from one attraction to the next.
The effect is oddly similar to that of a theme park: a Disneyfied pilgrimage. For a fee, you can even abseil off the ancient city walls. It's easy to forget that actual people live here.
Israel/Palestine has long occupied a fetishised place in the Western imagination. Through the ages, Christian pilgrims have come to the Holy Land trying to capture a sense of the land as it was in biblical times. Since the creation of Israel, Jewish tourists have joined them, seeking to experience an ancient Jewish past interwoven with the present-day Zionist state.
Alongside this, in recent decades a new brand of tourism has emerged: solidarity tourism.
Progressive, left-leaning Westerners travel to Palestine to identify with the struggle and get an authentic "occupation experience". British artist Banksy's new "Walled Off Hotel" offering a view of the West Bank barrier wall in Bethlehem is the latest example of this trend.
Although these two tourism streams appeal to entirely disparate markets, they both rely on the idea of a static, mythical Palestine, not a living place inhabited by real human beings. Thus, Palestinians have been transformed from 19th-century extras inhabiting an ancient biblical landscape into 21st-century victims who need to be saved from the brutality of occupation.
Solidarity tourism, like any form of tourism, is an income generator, which can be seen as helping people who are suffering under occupation. But when well-meaning tourists come to witness the struggle, they also unwittingly create an economic demand for maintaining the status quo.
For instance, enterprising Palestinians opened a Banksy shop to sell their wares right by the separation wall long before the "Walled Off Hotel" opened, and a Dutch NGO set up a website where you could pay to have artwork or slogans painted on the wall - an act of imprinting your opinions on the landscape that is oddly reminiscent of the century-old Jewish "plant a tree in Israel" initiatives.
Banksy is an artist, and his hotel is most likely more an artistic and political statement than it is a commercial enterprise. There is some debate about the role of art in the struggle against the occupation: perhaps, for instance, the wall that runs through the land should not be covered in colourful images and defiant slogans; perhaps the cement should be left untouched, a bleak testimony to the fact that it is not a tourist attraction, a symbolic object of artistic expression or moral outrage, but a brutal reality of life.
Palestinian artist Emily Jacir once wrote: "Every day there seems to be a new international group coming in to do an art project ??? This feels like an onslaught of art missionaries ??? Palestinians are asked to sing, to spray paint, to recite texts, recount hardships."
The question remains about the appropriateness of Banksy's Walled Off Hotel. Where do you draw the line between solidarity and self-aggrandisement in a stateless nation like Palestine where a fundraising effort to build a youth centre gives you, for ???100 ($140), the chance to have a street in a refugee camp named after yourself?
A charitable interpretation of Banksy's hotel might be that it is meant as a cynical comment - an intentionally grotesque edifice, complete with British colonial hotel settings, a statue of a chimp as a bellboy, and a naive painting of a pillow fight, that aims to highlight the absurdity of Western attitudes to the struggle.
But it may well be that it is not a parody at all; in this day and age, it's becoming harder and harder to tell the difference.
Sary Zananiri is a Melbourne-based artist and academic. Idan Ben-Barak is a science writer.
