"Everything that happened, happened here first, in rehearsal.
The invasion of Beirut, the first and second Intifada, the Gaza withdrawal, an attempted assassination of Saddam Hussein, the Battle of Falluja; almost every one of Israel's major military tactics in the Middle East over the past three decades was performed in advance in Chicago, an artificial but realistic Arab town built by the Israeli Defense Force in the middle of the Negev desert for urban combat training.
Broomberg and Chanarin offer an original visual analysis of contemporary Israel beginning in Chicago and ending in a sniper's lair. Nothing in this book is what it seems. A watermelon is revealed to be a suicide bomb; a tranquil forest becomes the site of a forensic investigation; a pastoral landscape becomes a warzone. Through this collection of simulated landscapes, buildings and objects, a new perspective on Israel begins to emerge."
