Watchtower, 2017

Created for the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem, Watchtower exemplifies Banksy’s extraordinary ability to transform the architecture of conflict into an image of innocence. A stark military watchtower, one of the defining symbols of the Israeli separation barrier, has been reimagined as the central pillar of a children’s carousel. Young boys and girls spin joyfully around the structure, their brightly coloured clothing standing in vivid contrast to the cold monochrome of the concrete tower and the dark, overcast sky.

The visual contradiction is both humorous and unsettling. Watchtowers are designed for surveillance, control and intimidation; playground rides are places of freedom, laughter and imagination. By merging the two, Banksy suggests that generations of Palestinian children have grown up knowing no other reality. What should be extraordinary has become ordinary. The machinery of occupation has become part of the landscape of childhood itself.

Like much of Banksy’s work, the painting avoids assigning heroes or villains. Instead, it focuses on the remarkable adaptability of children. They possess an extraordinary capacity to reclaim spaces intended to inspire fear, transforming them into places of play. This quiet resilience runs throughout the Walled Off Hotel, where imagination repeatedly emerges as a subtle form of resistance against oppression.

The work also echoes one of Banksy’s recurring artistic strategies: the appropriation of symbols of authority. Just as policemen dance, soldiers are searched, and riot shields become canvases, the watchtower here is stripped of its psychological power. It remains physically present, but its symbolic authority has been undermined by children’s laughter. In Banksy’s universe, humour is rarely an escape from reality; it is a means of confronting it.

Installed only metres from the very watchtowers that punctuate the separation barrier, the painting acquires an almost surreal immediacy. Visitors are invited to contemplate an image that feels whimsical inside the hotel while knowing that its subject exists just beyond the windows. Watchtower ultimately reminds us that children possess a unique ability to preserve hope in environments designed to suppress it, transforming even the bleakest monuments of division into fleeting moments of freedom.