of a recent interview with (by?) Sesshu Foster:
SF: What are Palestinian toy tank war sculptures made out of plastic?
BE: That is a hard story to tell, but I met a young man named Eid Suleiman Hadhalin in a tiny Bedouin village in the south Hebron hills. A black goat followed me around the village like a puppy, nibbling at my shoe laces. Another goat, four days old and born with deformed legs bayed miserably, ceaselessly, dragging its crippled forelegs, its chin in the dirt. The village was half in ruins, destroyed by Israeli bulldozers. Ezra Nawi, the Israeli activist who took me there, had been arrested in one of the ruins when it was still someone's home. He had refused to leave, refused to make way for the bulldozers. You can watch it on YouTube. The soldiers dragged him out, then bulldozed the house. Ezra went to prison for several months for that. The army has since issued demolition orders on every standing structure in the village, including the toilet and the communal oven. (The villagers, who are very poor, use goat dung for fuel; the Israeli settlers who live behind a fence just yards away claim the smoke is an environmental hazard.) Ezra told me I would like Eid. He was right. He told me that Eid was such a gentle and pure soul that he should not have been born in this world. I cannot judge that, but Eid had bright, glowing eyes and an open, joyful face. He lived with his wife and their two-year-old daughter. He was an artist. He gathered plastic scrap and trash from the landscape, cut it in strips and sewed them together to build small, scale sculptures of attack helicopters and bulldozers. They were perfect, beautiful things, precisely painted. He had put a small motor from a child's toy in the helicopter so that its rotors actually spun. But he had stopped making helicopters, he told me. "We don't make war here," he said, and laughed. Now he just made bulldozers.