Israel Inside Out

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Broomberg and Chanarin's photos lack such giddiness. Their Chicago is an eerie ghost town inhabited by burned-out cars and pockmarked cutouts of Israeli soldiers 'Arabized' to look like the enemy. Cement walls have been punched through with star-shaped holes, the scars of 'worming' -- an Israeli tactic of traveling through dense urban areas by blasting through interior walls, into living rooms and bedrooms, instead of venturing into vulnerable streets and alleys. Other walls are marred with graffiti ('Reign of chaos,' 'The end!').

'It is difficult to pinpoint what it is about this place that is disturbing,' Broomberg and Chanarin write in the text that decodes their photos. 'Perhaps it's the combination of the vicariousness and the violence. It's as if the soldiers have entered the enemy's private domain while he's sleeping or out for lunch, sifting through all his private belongings with too much curiosity.'

But this is not the enemy's domain; it is an Israeli conception of it. This divide -- between how Israelis imagine themselves and Palestinians, between what they see and what they don't -- provides the common thread throughout Chicago. Relying on a kind of inverted documentary approach, the book's images show not reality, but a fantasy of it.

Take, for example, a chapter chronicling a day in the life of Mini Israel, a popular attraction where tourists walk or ride golf carts through a scale model of the country. Where Chicago posits an imagined Arab reality, this plasticized utopia offers Israel's vision of itself. Toylike Israelis sun at the beach, pray at the Western Wall, watch the sunset from their balconies. Tiny construction workers lay bricks for new buildings, continuing Israel's development unabated. Meanwhile, a carefree Muslim man tends his sheep; other Muslims pray toward Mecca.

'There is something painfully nostalgic about the place, giving rise to the uncomfortable sensation of visiting a future that was meant to come to pass but never did,' Broomberg and Chanarin write. 'In this fantasy there are no checkpoints or observation towers. No suicide bombers. No armed security guards. No anxiety.'

Other chapters echo this willed myopia. One shows nothing but close-ups of rock walls -- what Jewish settlers see from the car window as they travel some of the 'bypass' roads that permit unfettered travel in the Occupied Territories. Another features the views from inside various Israeli surveillance posts -- 'a fragmented, militarized vision of the land that transforms the entire panorama into a potential battlefield.'

A subtler series shows the biblically idyllic forests planted by Jews throughout the country -- 'natural' scenes that leave little trace, the authors write, of the Arab communities that once were there. Another showcases studio portraits of bombs disguised as everyday objects: a fire extinguisher, a watermelon, a beer can. But these are actually recreations, painstakingly handcrafted by the Israeli Bomb Disposal Unit for its Jerusalem museum.

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