When the graffiti artist Banksy toured the West Bank and Gaza 15 years ago, the works he left behind on security walls and checkpoints satirised the Israeli occupation.
Satire has had its revenge. One of his pieces, a much-celebrated mural of a rat with a slingshot that disappeared from view some years ago, has turned up in a fashionable Tel Aviv art gallery.
To add insult to injury, the gallery and Israeli media have reclaimed the image of the rat as their own — saying that, rather than being an apparent tribute to teenage Palestinian stone-throwers, it symbolises the biblical fight between the Israelite David and Goliath, the giant warrior of the Philistines, the ancient term that is now the Arabic for Palestinians.
“As far