PEACE ON EARTH - TERMS AND CONDITIONS APPLY

A Conditional Peace

Created alongside Angels on the Wall in December 2017, Peace on Earth — Terms and Conditions Apply transforms one of the most familiar phrases associated with Christmas into the language of contemporary commerce. The words PEACE ON EARTH appear prominently on the wall, followed by an asterisk directing the viewer to the qualification “Terms and conditions apply.”

The intervention is characteristically economical. “Peace on Earth” belongs to the Christian language of the Nativity and therefore carries particular resonance in Bethlehem. Banksy leaves the familiar expression intact but subjects it to the kind of disclaimer routinely encountered in advertising, contracts and online transactions. Peace is presented as though it were a commercial offer whose apparent promise is limited by conditions disclosed elsewhere.

The humor depends upon the disproportion between the two forms of language. A universal aspiration is expressed with the confidence of a slogan, while the smaller qualification introduces bureaucracy, negotiation and restriction. Within the political geography of Bethlehem, the phrase acquires a more specific meaning: the abstract ideal of peace exists alongside a complex reality of borders, checkpoints, competing political claims and restrictions on movement. Banksy avoids describing those circumstances directly, allowing the location to supply much of the work's political context.

Christmas in Bethlehem

The work was unveiled during The Alternativity, the alternative Nativity project staged in Bethlehem in December 2017 in association with Banksy's Walled Off Hotel. The project reconsidered the traditional Christmas narrative through the contemporary circumstances of the city in which that narrative originated, bringing together local performers, international collaborators and Banksy's own interventions.

The relationship between the two murals is particularly effective. Angels on the Wall translates religious imagery into physical action, with celestial figures attempting to open the barrier, while Peace on Earth — Terms and Conditions Apply subjects a traditional message of Christmas to the restrictive language of a contractual disclaimer. One works through figurative imagery and the physical architecture of the wall; the other through language, irony and context.

The Walled Off Hotel

Opened in March 2017, the Walled Off Hotel represented a significant expansion of Banksy's longstanding engagement with Palestine. Rather than creating a temporary series of murals, Banksy established a permanent destination in which art, tourism, history and political education were deliberately combined. Located immediately beside the separation barrier, the hotel made the wall an unavoidable part of the visitor's experience while also providing spaces devoted to Palestinian artists and to the history of the conflict.

The two December murals should therefore be understood within this broader project rather than as isolated street works. They extend the Walled Off Hotel's central strategy into the streets of Bethlehem, using the familiar visual and verbal language of Christmas to examine the distance between universal ideals and contemporary political realities. Their location in the city traditionally associated with Christ's birth gives both interventions a specificity that would be substantially diminished if the same images appeared elsewhere.