"This is him," the taxi driver proclaimed triumphantly, quickly flashing a photograph of a bespectacled European man who looked to be in his mid-forties. "I worked with him when he was here."

The donkey theme is offensive to some.

"That's Banksy?" I asked incredulously. We had come to Bethlehem to do a story on the latest outbreak of wall art, including work by the British urban guerrilla artist who goes by the name of Banksy.

The eight-meter-high concrete wall Israel built around Bethlehem -- officially intended to keep Palestinian suicide bombers out of Israel -- has become the world's largest canvas. Palestinian and international artists have covered it with grafitti, art and slogans against Israel's forty-year occupation of the West Bank.

Courtest: Yasmine Perni.

Among Banksy's contributions are a painting of a dove of peace, olive branch in its beak, wearing a bullet-proof vest. Another shows a little girl in a dress frisking a soldier.

On a house wall inside Bethlehem, Banksy painted a silhouette of a soldier checking a donkey's ID. An Irish resident of Bethlehem, whose home overlooks the soldier and the donkey, told me he thought it depicted a soldier reading to a donkey.

The donkey theme is offensive to some, however. One man looked disdainfully at the silhouette and told me, "Look, Israeli soldiers check our IDs all the time. So does that mean we are donkeys?" No, someone else replied. "Don't you see, it's not the donkey who's the real donkey in that painting."

Courtesy: Yasmine Perni.

We won't be able to know what Banksy himself intended. He has given only one interview in his career, and I couldn't find a photograph of him during his latest visit here a few weeks ago, or when he first came here in 2005. No Bethlehem resident I spoke to had seen Banksy -- working or relaxing -- when he was here -- with the exception of course of the taxi driver. Banksy, it was dawning on me, is an anomaly in this age in which fame, celebrity and media-hyped cult of personality are a package deal.

A British arts company has set up a temporary gallery in Bethlehem's Manger Square which goes by the name "Santa's Ghetto." There I met a variety of people who said they knew Banksy, but each had a different description. One, a beer-sipping British board game designer with white hair, said he knew Banksy, who he said is in his thirties.

Courtesy: Yasmine Perni.

"Trash," a Palestinian artist from Bethlehem, told me he knew Banksy, who is in his fifties. A third guy, also from the UK, insisted he had met Banksy, who is in his twenties.

Someone else told me Banksy is an anti-capitalist idealist who doesn't care about money, and just wants a bit of change in his pocket to allow him to pursue his career as phantom artist.

"Don't believe a word of it," someone who overheard this claim interjected. "The man is loaded."

Courtesy: Yasmine Perni.

And while a lot of these artist types seem a tad scruffy, look like they've been down and out for a while, appearances may be deceiving. Maybe it's because I spend my time in all the wrong places, but at Santa's Ghetto I discovered that art does not come cheap.

"I want this piece for $30,000," I overheard the beer-sipping British board game designer say nonchalantly, pointing to a dark, chaotic painting of a half-human, half-beast with dollar signs all over it.

Courtesy: Yasmine Perni.

Thirty-thousand dollars, I was told, is nothing. Some of the artwork was worth more than a hundred thousand dollars, and more.

The money from the sale of art at Santa's Ghetto does go to a good cause. All of it, I was told, will be given to children's projects in Bethlehem.

I thought of buying something, so I asked the man running the show, who would only give his name as Tristan, if prints were on sale. He said they were available on their Web site, which he showed me. They started at $400 a piece. Never mind, I told myself. Art collecting is not in my future. I'll wait until they come out as $10 posters.

You can watch my report here.

-- From CNN Senior Correspondent Ben Wedeman