The economic machinations of the art world are often obscured, even if they remain largely traceable through commercial galleries, fairs, auction houses, cultural foundations, contemporary art institutions, public museums, educational platforms, and the like. Cultural practitioners operating in this “official” art world generally understand how visibility adds to capital value there: one invests in artworks, which are essentially the “stocks” of an artist, and their value increases as they circulate across the official art world’s platforms. The rules are different for what I term the “shadow art world,” where cultural workers, artists, writers, filmmakers, choreographers, set designers, and game developers are employed directly by the military-industrial complex in operational and often classified tasks. These cultural workers are hardly discussed in the art world’s liberal climate—a superficial politics that this world uses to obscure the brutality of its own financialization. But just because we are unaware of the shadow art world doesn’t make it any less powerful. You don’t need to have noticed Trump ideologue Steve Bannon’s films circulating in the shadow art world to suddenly wake up in a reality scripted by Bannon. You don’t need to know the dramaturgical or literary work of Putin ideologue Vladislav Surkov to know the theaters of war his works have helped bring to life. The question arises: Why do we know so little about the shadow art world, especially when it disproportionately influences our lives—and deaths?
The dominant political and media class tends to argue that Israel’s seventy-seven-year occupation and extermination campaign in Palestine—which will continue until root causes are addressed—is a “response.” But this genocide was rehearsed. Today, even the term “Israeli occupation” no longer suffices when plans for a “Greater Israel,” extending from the Nile to the Euphrates, are publicly propagated by Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and other perpetrators of genocide. In this text I will discuss the cultural work and imaginary underlying genocide rehearsal—the parts of the shadow art world where the genocide was scripted, visualized, and staged long before the Palestinian people were bombed, shot, executed, starved, and sadistically used for target practice, with all of this live-streamed across the world.
1. Spect-Actors of the Shadow Art World
We start with the United States, itself founded on the extermination of ninety to ninety-five percent of its Indigenous peoples. The U.S. military-industrial complex pioneered the “militainment” industry to systematically use cultural forms infused with military logics and values to militarize the entirety of life. There are countless examples of the U.S. employing popular culture for military purposes, most famously through its Disney and Marvel entertainment franchises. I will focus on cultural forms that aim at immersion, meaning forms that implicate participants in a more profound mental or even physical manner than as mere readers or viewers. Brazilian dramaturg and activist Augusto Boal famously spoke of the “spect-actor,” who breaks with the passivity of a spectator to become an actor-creator on stage and in life. The shadow art world similarly seeks to mobilize publics beyond spectatorship—not to prevent genocide, but to fully participate in its realization and direction.
A foundational example is America’s Army, a free multiplayer shooter game conceived by Colonel Casey Wardynski in 2002 and developed as a recruiting and training platform for the U.S. Army. Players log in through the Army’s recruitment website to be put into wartime scenarios based on actual (though sanitized) war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, reconstructed as fictional countries with names like “Czervenia.” America’s Army has been enormously successful, with four installments between 2002 and 2013. In ten years, more than thirteen million players have spent some 260 million hours fighting anonymized, ever-expanding threats around the world.
Organizations such as the Iran-backed Shia political party and paramilitary group Hezbollah quickly realized the danger posed by one-sided, imperialist militainment, so they developed their own games. In Special Force 2: Tale of the Truthful Pledge (2006), the Israeli occupation regime is the main target, while The Holy Defense: Protecting the Homeland and the Holy Sites (2018) simulates the fight against ISIS in Syria. Hezbollah’s game design is extremely specific, graphically depicting the killing of Israeli occupation forces and Islamic State militants, and framing this as part of the organization’s regional political aspirations. America’s Army, on the other hand, uses generic uniforms and masks to abstract adversaries into “faceless enemy avatars,” upon which the player can project any possible past, present, or future enemy of the United States. These “composite enemy avatars” could be Afghan, Russian, or Chinese. They could be all of the above or none of the above. In the imperialist, expansionist imaginary underlying these forms of militainment, who counts as an enemy or a friend depends on the geopolitical interests of a given moment.
2. The Art of (Future) War
The wildly successful militainment industry has for years replicated the U.S. Army’s imperialist imaginary for free through blockbuster games such as Call of Duty, which has averaged since its creation 250 million players per year playing over twenty-five billion hours. With no further need to develop new games, the U.S. Army created its own Army Esports Team in 2018—uniforms and all—to competitively play Call of Duty, Fortnite, and other recruitment-compatible games. Simultaneously, the military-industrial complex started directly hiring game developers. Call of Duty game designer Dave Anthony, along with August Cole and Peter Singer, the authors of the techno-thriller franchise Ghost Fleet, were recruited to advise the Pentagon-linked Atlantic Council’s Art of Future Warfare project. Military leaders had been impressed by these artists’ imaginative scripts for future forms of warfare, focused on cyberattacks aimed at crashing stock exchanges or drones that are hacked and turned against their operators. Dave Anthony himself noted that “as a director and writer, my job is to break expectations and established thinking without fear of failure in order to create new and fresh ideas.” The process is striking: the U.S. military, through its own games, creates a culture in which militainment becomes commonplace, and then identifies game designers from that culture to recruit back into the war machine proper.
This shadow art world recruitment has been picked up by other countries. In 2019, the French Ministry of Defense launched the Red Team Defense program: a group of futurists and science-fiction writers and artists tasked with scripting “disruptive scenarios for the 2030—2060 timeframe.” While most of Red Team’s work is classified, some scenarios were shared with the public, such as the “P-Nation”—Pirate Nation—narrative imagining a future pirate confederation made up of rapidly growing stateless global slums plagued by climate catastrophe and filled with disenfranchised activist youth frustrated by the surveillance society of Europe. By recruiting these digital natives, P-Nation can wield drones and hackers as easily as speedboats, and earns the backing of a global digital movement. The scenario reframes pirates and piracy as a strategic and hybrid threat to France and NATO in the next two decades, scripted and visualized by prominent science-fiction writers like Romain Lucazeau and illustrator François Schuiten, based on racialized War on Terror tropes: the brown or black pirate as essentially the new terrorist, “radicalized” youth as the “woke pro-Hamas left,” and P-Nation as a rogue state actor.
Red Team’s latest public release is a slim file on a future space rush, where hybrid state-corporate organizations seek to mine resources from asteroids and other planets. The scenario unfolds in a mid-twenty-first century dominated by two hegemons: the North American and European state-regulated PebbleX and the state-capitalist theocracy Republic of the Circle. When the Republic of the Circle claims extraplanetary extractive zones for their own exclusive development, mutual sabotage and large-scale armed conflict threaten the stability of a planetary economy largely dependent on these hegemons’ exploits.
In this scenario, the Republic of the Circle plays the role of the illiberal “rogue state.” Its portrayal merges China’s party-guided economic model with Iran’s theocratic model to create a dialectical antagonist that combines two of the principal enemy actors from the NATO imaginary. A striking image by graphic-novel artist Amaury Bündgen depicts the Republic of the Circle’s lunar extraction base. This AI-driven facility resembles a large insect—a classic propaganda trope for depicting an enemy: crawling underground or in the shadows, or in this case on the dark side of the moon. Thus dehumanized, violence against such vermin becomes legitimate even before the enemy leaves the space of imagination to manifest in material reality.
While the P-Nation scenario extends the narrative tropes of the ongoing War on Terror, the space rush scenario challenges the French state to anticipate interplanetary empire-building by state-corporate entities. Both suggest French aspirations for dominance. While Emmanuel Macron reads these dossiers personally and has requested a direct line to Red Team so he can pose questions to them, we should keep in mind that the impact and influence of the shadow art world is shaped by its classified nature. The shadow art world only shows what it wants to be visible, as demonstrated by artist Trevor Paglen’s foundational research on the “dark world” of the U.S. military-industrial complex. Most iconic is his collection of badges that use obscure symbols and phrases and that represent classified entities funded by undisclosed military black budgets. As with the Red Team dossiers, these badges embody a form of “visible invisibility”: a desire for the public to know you exist without understanding the actual scope of your existence.
The shadow art world’s aesthetics of impenetrability exercise power over our imaginary by mystifying the security apparatus and paradoxically mixing fear and trust, since no one can know how this apparatus actually works. We casually say that “they” monitor, extract, and possibly flag our text messages, phone conversations, and data. Our inability to specify who “they” are—a fundamental feature of contemporary life—is precisely what enables the shadow art world to propagate and normalize a security apparatus that we both fear and feel protected by. Some may be surprised that cultural workers are willing to operate in the shadow art world, contributing to the entrenchment or expansion of empire. But there is another more critical question: Are game developers and science fiction artists merely predicting the wars of the future, or are they actually writing those wars into existence?
3. Composite States and Imperial Imaginaries
It’s easy to imagine how an America’s Army player could end up as a solider at the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin in Southern California. Nicknamed “The Sandbox,” from 2003 to 2011 the NTC was the site of detailed replica villages modeled on actual villages in Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition to crafting whole towns optimized by Hollywood set designers, the NTC also employed Iraqi Americans to live in the simulation for seventeen days each month. In some cases, extras played the role of homeless people. Detailed scripts were provided to the actors in order to create a full-immersive simulation for soldiers. The simulation included suicide attacks, bombs, sniper fire, and continuous scrutiny from INN (a fictional version of CNN that broadcasted every military mistake). “Insurgents” were trained by actor Carl Weathers, famous for his role in the action film Predator (1987). NTC leaders referred to the scripts of villagers and soldiers as “improvised Shakespearean plays.” Referencing Augusto Boal in relation to the NTC, performance theorist Scott Magelssen writes that “while all political theatre hopes its messages will be explicitly manifested in the world outside the simulation, theatre immersion in the Sandbox is clearly one example where there is no question about theatre having an impact on reality.”
In 2012, as counterinsurgency missions in Afghanistan and Iraq wound down and fresh imperial horizons dawned, a new immersive scenario developed by the U.S. Army introduced five fictional “composite” states. Among these, “Donovia” was geographically, politically, culturally, and militarily modeled on the Russian Federation, but also included characteristics of Belarus, Syria, Iran, and China. In the immersive scenario, Donovia invaded “Atropia”—a resource-rich nation and U.S. ally geographically modeled on Azerbaijan and the Caspian region, but incorporating lessons from the Russian invasion of Georgia and narratively assuming the position of Ukraine. The Atropian population was played by American civilians with Russian or Arab backgrounds or language skills, while the Donovian aggressors were plays by U.S. military units themselves.
There are several possible reasons why this immersive scenario eschews the Hollywood realism of existing countries in favor of a composite model of ally and enemy. Literally scripting the conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine could itself provoke escalation, even if everyone knows the script is a propaganda power play that openly rehearses all-out conflict precisely because the opponent in question doesn’t have the means to strike preemptively. But the most important reason has to do with the aesthetic model of the composite nation, people, and enemy as the foundation of the imperial imaginary. The imperial enemy has to be everyone and no one at the same time. It has to encompass multiple possible opponents so that multiple parallel strategies of dehumanization can be enacted and tested at the same time, laying the groundwork for future invasions, occupations, and extermination campaigns.
Initially developed two years before the 2014 invasion of Crimea, the Donovia-Atropia scenario pre-enacted—and possibly pre-scripted—a real material conflict. It was subsequently adjusted multiple times to reflect the realities on the ground after the invasion of Crimea and the start of the war against Ukraine in 2022. From 2014 onwards, the updated Donovia-Atropia scenario coupled military invasion with hybrid warfare, adding separatist movements in Atropia (which has a Donovan minority) and social media disinformation campaigns on “Tweeter” and “Fakebook.” In 2022, the scenario expanded yet again to include a Western-armed and foreign-trained Atropian army, extensive trench warfare, and dynamic weapons such as drone swarms and cyberattacks. Here we see the dynamic between imagining a future war and the impact of that actual war on its imagined scenario.
Most importantly, over many elaborate rehearsals these massive scenographic, spatial, and physical war games internalize “us-versus-them” binaries, normalize war (and a 5 percent GDP war economy), and perpetuate the racialized tropes that legitimate large-scale exterminatory violence. No wonder that, since 2015, the U.S. has pushed other NATO members to adopt the Donovia-Atropia script as their main war-game scenario. Since the war in Ukraine began, military personnel have become regular guests on popular talk shows, showcasing their military equipment and briefing the public on frontline developments, as if in a war room. The script writers, dramaturges, actors, set designers, choreographers, and directors of the immersive theaters of the shadow art world are at the center of this thorough militarization of our reality.
4. From Genocide Rehearsal to Reality
A similar shift from targeted occupation to imperial imaginary can be seen in the history of the IDF’s Urban Warfare Training Center at Tze’elim Army Base. Eyal Weizman has described its origins:
In June 2002, the military started to upgrade a small mock-up town located at the IDF’s base of Tze’elim [Wadi al-Sayal] in the Negev desert [the an-Naqab desert, occupied Palestine, JS], named Chicago (invoking the bullet-ridden myth of the American city), turning it into what was then the world’s largest mocked-up oriental city used for practicing military assaults. Chicago includes an area called the Kasbah: a dense market area with narrow alleys, a section simulating a refugee camp, a downtown area with broader streets and tanks, and a neighborhood resembling a rural village.
In 2005, following the second Intifada, the U.S. funded the expansion of this immersive theater, which ultimately included more than six hundred structures: mock apartment blocks, mosques, markets, narrow alleys, and tunnel networks. The U.S. Army, other NATO members, and even UN peacekeeping missions use the facility regularly. Weizman maps how the Urban Warfare Training Center, like Fort Irwin’s NTC, has been optimized by a shadow art world of set designers, prop builders, and theater consultants to resemble a functioning town, even if the only inhabitants are occupation forces performing the role of the resistance by wearing red keffiyehs and carrying rocket launchers. Although some mannequins might play the role of “civilians,” the only real occupants are the resistance, obviating the need to distinguish between combatant and noncombatant. As researcher Shimrit Lee notes, “The ‘architecture of enmity’ needs no real population to inhabit its empty refugee camps. The securitized Other is merely implied.”
This immersive theater “Chicago” was also known as “Hezbollahland” when it was used to rehearse the invasion of Lebanon. Today it is commonly referred to as “Mini-Gaza.” In its early phase, the Urban Warfare Training Center was strategically ambiguous about which people it rehearsed assaulting and murdering; officials there described the replica structures as a generic “Arab town,” implying no reference to a Palestinian nation or people. More recent reports, however, document explicit references to Palestine in murals of resistance leaders and martyrs, such as the late Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The ultimate goal of the scripts rehearsed in “Mini-Gaza” is not fighting the resistance but internalizing the idea that the entirety of the Palestinian built environment is hostile and liable to turn against the occupying soldiers at any moment.
Paradoxically, as these depictions of enemy combatants become more specific (from an “Arab town” to Hamas), the scope of possible targets widens exponentially. Noa Roei and Gabriel Schwake describe this as the training center’s “pastiche of threats,” arguing that “windows, balconies, and roofs in different heights are not intended to mimic an ideal picturesque scenery of an Arab lived space but to illustrate the different spots one needs to cover,” transforming “the interior of an Arab house into a simple list of targets, vulnerabilities, and potential hazards.” While Hamas fighters may be the ostensible targets, the scenery propagates the idea that Hamas extends from tunnels equally to kitchens, schools, and hospitals. This propagation was extended to absurd lengths when the Sumud Freedom Flotilla was declared a “Hamas Flotilla” by the Israeli government in September. This depiction of the enemy as literally anything and everything—from humans, to olive trees, to tunnels, to humanitarian aid—reveals the script’s exterminatory imaginary.
In their 2006 book Chicago, artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin photographed and analyzed the immersive theater of the Urban Warfare Training Center. They acutely and presciently observed: “Everything that happened, happened here first, in rehearsal.” Elsewhere they explained that “the invasion of Beirut, the first and second intifadas, the Gaza withdrawal … —almost every one of Israel’s major tactical operations in the Middle East during the past three decades was performed in advance here.” Almost twenty years after the publication of Chicago, its argument still stands, most literally in the immersive theater where, leading up to the ground invasion of October 2023, IDF soldiers had been preparing a mission that involved “capturing Gaza City, wiping out all of Hamas leadership, and a possible 18-month campaign to eradicate terrorists.” In 2025, an entirely new facility dubbed “Little Lebanon” was opened to make the rehearsals for ground invasions and expansionist occupation durational. Like its U.S. enabler, Israel’s military-training scripts are tested before they are enacted in reality, and this reality feeds back into the scripts. In the evolution of these scripts we see how a shift from the settler-colonial imaginary of the Israeli occupation to an imperial mindset is being normalized.
When we examine the cultural work of the shadow art world, the accelerated phase of genocide since October 8, 2023 looks less like a “response” than a foreshadowed result of the occupier’s military and imaginal rehearsals. An example of this cultural work is a 2024 mural inside the Urban Warfare Training Center that depicts Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar (who would be murdered later that year) as a human-rat hybrid emerging from an underground tunnel. The painting was made by occupation soldiers tasked with creating fake graffiti and murals depicting slogans and symbols of the resistance, to heighten the realism of the environment. It this not the exterminatory imagination of the immersive theater folding back on itself? The unambiguous representation of Palestinians as subhuman shape-shifters, as plague, as vermin, is revealed within the training environment constructed to propagate precisely this narrative. This mural corresponds to the worst kind of exterminatory propaganda: Fritz Hippler’s 1940 faux-documentary film Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), depicting Jewish people as a degenerate, parasitical—and simultaneously all-powerful—infestation. The immersive theater of the Urban Warfare Training Center scripts, stages, and rehearses an imaginary, “fabricated reality” that, in the words of Noa Roei and Gabriel Schwake, “sooner or later replaces its referent.”
5. Against Genocidalism: Training Genopoiesis
In this essay I have discussed the interlinked imperial and exterminatory imaginations rehearsed in the shadow art world—a frequently classified cultural field of immersive video games and militarized science fiction, a world of large-scale scenography and racialized, dehumanizing scripts that turn occupied peoples into all-encompassing threats. But is genocide the singular outcome of these imperial and exterminatory threats? Or is the real modus operandi of Empire’s expanding global state of Apartheid the necropolitical management of populations? If so, then the shadow art world’s culturizing and normalizing of genocide becomes a unifying condition that runs through the colonial, imperial, and capitalist systems. Rather than operate in the shadows, the imperial and exterminatory imaginaries of the shadow art world will become the sanctioned aesthetics of end-times fascism.
Our task now is to counter these imperial and exterminatory imaginaries not only by boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning the regimes and institutions that normalize genocidalism, but also by propagating cultures of life and resistance. We need training camps of our own, where we script, choreograph, stage, visualize, and perform not genocide, but genopoiesis.
Notes:
For analysis of the art world’s role in money laundering, speculation, and tax evasion—and of the artists that counter-map and counteract financialization—see Max Haiven, Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (Pluto Press, 2018).
Eyal Weizman has explored the notion of a cultural shadow world by referring to research by Stephen Graham on “military urban research institutes and training centres that have been set up to rethink military operations in urban areas.” Weizman has adopted avant-garde cultural theory from the official art world to elaborate the shadow world of military intelligence. See Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (Verso, 2007). This brings to mind what artist Trevor Paglen terms the “black world” or the “secret state” (as well as “dark geography”), which is less about the way a shadow world creates its own culture or adopts culture from the official art world than about the capacity of artistic tools to resist visibility. See Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (New American Library, 2010).
See Jonas Staal, “Propaganda (Art) Struggle,” e-flux journal, no. 94 (October 2018) →; and Staal, Steve Bannon: A Propaganda Retrospective (Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2018).
See HyperNormalisation, directed by Adam Curtis (BBC, 2016); and Propaganda Theater, Video Study, directed by Jonas Staal (Jindřich Chalupecký Society, 2023).
On the relationship between the Greater Israel doctrine and the intensification of genocide in Palestine since October 8, 2023, see Francesca Albanese, “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967,” filed at the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly, October 1, 2024. On further expansionist claims made by Netanyahu, see “Arab, Islamic Countries Condemn Netanyahu’s ‘Greater Israel’ Remark,” Al Jazeera, August 16, 2025.
Manisha Ganguly, “‘A Deadly Scheme’: Palestinians Face Indiscriminate Gunfire at Food Sites,” The Guardian, August 9, 2025.
An “American Holocaust,” in the words of Cherokee-American anthropologist Russell Thornton in American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1987). Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues that this multi-century genocide is ongoing in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2015).
P. W. Singer, “MEET THE SIMS … and Shoot Them,” Foreign Policy, no. 178 (March—April 2010).
Marc DiPaulo, War, Politics, and Superheroes (McFarland & Company, 2011).
Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed (Pluto Press, 2008).
For a comprehensive history of America’s Army as a milestone of twenty-first-century militainment, see Robertson Allen, America’s Digital Army: Games at Work and War (University of Nebraska Press, 2017).
Marcus Schulzke, “America’s Army,” in Zones of Control: Perspectives on War Gaming, ed. Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (MIT Press, 2016), 303.
Dima Saber and Nick Webber, “‘This Is Our Call of Duty’: Hegemony, History, and Resistant Videogames in the Middle East,” Media, Culture & Society 39 no. 1 (2017).
Schulzke, “America’s Army,” 307. Robertson Allen discusses the realness of the unreal composite enemy: “The unreal enemy is an enemy with minimal cultural, linguistic, or ethnic indicators and therefore one which is simultaneously anonymous yet potentially anyone. Everywhere and nowhere at once, the unreal enemy is a tabula rasa on which any enemy can be extrapolated.” Allen, “The Unreal Enemy of America’s Army,” Games and Culture 6, no. 1 (2011): 52.
That is roughly 2.85 million years of gameplay, the equivalent of the Pleistocene, more commonly known as the Ice Age. See Matt Liebl, “25 Billion Hours Have Been Spent Playing Call of Duty,” AOL, August 10, 2016 →; and Alex Co, “Activision: Over 250M People Played Call of Duty Last Year; Monthly Active Users Grew to Over 100M in 2020,” MP1st, February 5, 2021.
Atlantic Council, “Atlantic Council Announces New Art of Future Warfare Project,” press release, November 19, 2014.
Quoted in Simon Parkin, “Call of Duty: Gaming’s Role in the Military-Entertainment Complex,” The Guardian,October 22, 2014.
See the official website of Red Team Defense.
Red Team, Ces Guerres Qui Nous Attendant 2030—2060 (Equateurs / PSL, 2022), 13—70.
Red Team, Ces Guerres Qui Nous Attendant 2030-2060: Saison 3 (Paris: Equateurs / PSL, 2024), 85—151.
See Jonas Staal, “Propagating ‘Them’ in Fascist, Imperial, Liberal and Emancipatory Politics,” in Transatlantic Practices of Fascism(s) and Populism(s) from the Margins: The Cultural Politics of “Us” versus “Them,” ed. Reindert Dhondt, Monica Jansen, and Maria Bonaria Urban (Routledge, forthcoming 2026).
Claire Paccalin, “Why Macron Is Reading Sci-Fi Thrillers to Prepare for the Wars of the Future,” France 24, June 6, 2023.
Trevor Paglen, I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me (Melville House Publishing, 2010).
“Visible invisibility” can then function as “evidence of evidence”—as something more that we know exists, without having the capacity to access its exact form of existence. See Thomas Keenan, “Disappearances: On the Photographs of Trevor Paglen,” in Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism, ed. Meg McLagan and Yates McKee (Zone Books, 2012), 47. This bears a striking resemblance to Sven Lütticken’s idea of “the public sphere as a structural conspiracy,” which is itself a critical take on the Rumsfeldian “known unknown.” See Lütticken, Secret Publicity (NAi Publishers, 2005), 194—95.
Scott Magelssen, “Rehearsing the ‘Warrior Ethos’: ‘Theatre Immersion’ and the Simulation of Theatres of War,” Drama Review 53, no. 1 (Spring 2009).
Magelssen, “Rehearsing the ‘Warrior Ethos,’” 55.
Magelssen, “Rehearsing the ‘Warrior Ethos,’” 69.
U.S. Army, Decisive Action Training Environment, version 2.2, April 2015.
Anita Stratton, “Roleplayers and Technology Enhance Soldier training,” Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, August 24, 2015.
A core shift was the introduction of a “One Donovia” narrative—referencing the “Greater Russia” thesis—that suggests that Donovia (Russia) is not just a threat to Atropia (Ukraine) but to Europe as a whole. See Stephen Wright, “Decisive Action Training Environment (DATE) Update: One Donovia,” T2COM G2, May 21, 2024.
Oliver Wainwright, “‘We’ve Got Drone Swarms, Dirty Bombs, Radar-Jamming’: The Fake Town Where America Practices for War,” The Guardian, May 15, 2024.
In 2025 alone the U.S. military has organized multiple major war-game exercises in Europe, including the two-part “Combined Resolve 25” exercise at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Germany, involving thousands of troops from more than sixteen nations; the multinational “Defender Europe 25” exercise in Kosovo; and the “Saber Junction 25” exercise at Hohenfels Training Area in Germany. All followed the same script.
Weizman, Hollow Land, 205—8.
For a current account of the training facility, see the website of the Israeli occupation forces, although we cannot assume this provides full disclosure due to the largely classified nature of the facility: “Urban Warfare Training Center—Simulating the Modern Battle-Field,” October 26, 2011.
“In certain training sessions the military enlisted the stage-set designer of a well-known Tel Aviv theatre to provide the relevant props and organize the special effects.” Weizman, Hollow Land, 208. Media reporting and photographic evidence from visits to the facility indicate that occupation soldiers themselves perform the role of the resistance. See Oded Balilty, “Israelis Train in Ghost Town Dubbed ‘Mini Gaza,’” Associated Press, 2022.
As Noa Roei and Gabriel Schwake argue: “In their design of Arab urban dwellings—from the single unit to the broader distribution of space—as spaces of threat, Chicago and Al Furan work, in practice, to undermine the distinction between the enemy combatant and city dweller.” Roei and Schwake, “Pastiche of Threats: A Spatial Analysis of Military Urban Training Centres,” Amsterdam Museum Journal, no. 1 (Fall 2023): 110.
Shimrit Lee, “Simulating the Contact Zone: Corporate Mediations of (Less-Lethal) Violence in Israel, Palestine, and Beyond,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 75 (Autumn 2018): 35.
Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (Verso, 2011), 194. The use of the term “Mini Gaza” seems to have begun in 2022, as reported by Oded Balilty, “Israelis Train in Ghost Town Dubbed ‘Mini Gaza.’”
“This convention of using the name ‘Arab,’ rather than Palestinian, effectively obscures identity, and in this sense Chicago as a ghost-town evidences the thread of denial that runs through much of Israeli discourse about relations with Palestine, towns like Ramallah and Nablus.” Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Chicago(SteidlMACK, 2006), unnumbered.
“‘Mini Gaza’: The IDF’s Urban Warfare Training Center, a Town That’s Known Only War,” Times of Israel, June 22, 2022 →; Kelsey Vlamis, “See the Desert Ghost Town Israeli Soldiers Call ‘Mini Gaza,’ Where the Israel Defense Forces Train for Urban Warfare,” Business Insider, October 14, 2022.
Roei and Schwake, “A Pastiche of Threats,” 109.
Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Statement Regarding the Hamas Flotilla,” September 22, 2025.
Broomberg and Chanarin, Chicago.
Quoted in Daniel Tchetchik, “What Does an IDF Mock-Up of an Arab Village Tell Us About Israel?,” Haaretz, October 12, 2013. Note that Broomberg and Chanarin mention operations that preceded the 2003 construction of the large-scale immersive theater at the Urban Warfare Training Center. “The core of Chicago was built in the early 1980s as a small training site simulating a Lebanese village at a time when Israeli forces were occupying Lebanon.” See Eyal Weizman, “Frontier Architectures,” in Broomberg and Chanarin, Chicago.
Brendan Cole, “How Israel’s Fake City Helped Prepare for Gaza Invasion,” Newsweek, October 16, 2023.
Yoav Zitun, “IDF Unveils ‘Little Lebanon’ Training Facility to Prepare for Future Hezbollah Battles,” Ynet Global, May 5, 2025.
Yitzhak Eitan, “IDF Soldiers Use Art to Lift Spirits with Hamas Leader’s Caricature,” Hidabroot, January 21, 2024.
Roei and Schwake, “Pastiche of Threats,” 110.
Achille Mbembe defines necropolitics as the “generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations”—in short, “contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death.” Mbembe, Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019), 86, 92.
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, “The Rise of End Times Fascism,” The Guardian, April 13, 2025.