interactive rebase of binary files?

With the help of some friends, I now have an understanding of how to
tease interleaved commits out of a branch (dev, branched from master),
into two new branches (foo and bar, branched from dev):

git checkout dev
git checkout -b foo
git rebase -i master   #rebase everything SINCE master
etc., repeat for bar...

However, there is a problem with binary files.  For example, if I
specify "edit" in the git-rebase-todo list for one of the binary file
commits, only one version of the binary file is presented to me in the
working copy.  If it were a text file, I'd expect to see the standard
conflict stuff within the one file.  I'd edit and save that one file.
However, in the case of binary files, should I not see binary_file.a
and binary_file.b both in the working copy, so that I can compare and
pick a winner (or edit one of them into a winner)?

More likely, my expectations are due to my ignorance, and someone can
point me to the "git" way of doing this.  Please?

Phil Lawrence