This Land Is Mine | Nina Paley

A brief history of the land called Israel/Palestine/Canaan/the Levant.
Who’s Killing Who? A Viewer’s Guide. Because you can’t tell the players without a pogrom!

01. Early Man: This generic “caveman” represents the first human settlers in Israel/Canaan/the Levant. Whoever they were.
02. Canaanite: What did ancient Canaanites look like? I don’t know, so this is based on ancient Sumerian art.
03. Egyptian: Canaan was located between two huge empires. Egypt controlled it sometimes, and…
04. Assyrian: ….Assyria controlled it at other times.
05. Israelite: The “Children of Israel” conquered the shit out of the region, according to bloody and violent Old Testament accounts.
06. Babylonian: Then the Babylonians destroyed their temple and took the Hebrews into exile.
07. Macedonian/Greek: Here comes Alexander the Great, conquering everything!
08. Greek/Macedonian: No sooner did Alexander conquer everything, than his generals divided it up and fought with each other.
09. Ptolemaic: Greek descendants of Ptolemy, another of Alexander’s competing generals, ruled Egypt dressed like Egyptian god-kings. (The famous Cleopatra of Western mythology and Hollywood was a Ptolemy.)
10. Seleucid: More Greek-Macedonian legacies of Alexander.
11. Hebrew Priest: This guy didn’t fight, he just ran the Second Temple re-established by Hebrews in Jerusalem after the Babylonian Exile.
12. Maccabee: Led by Judah “The Hammer” Maccabee, who fought the Seleucids, saved the Temple, and invented Channukah. Until…
13. Roman: … The Romans destroyed the Second Temple and absorbed the region into the Roman Empire
14. Byzantine: ….which split into Eastern and Western Empires. The eastern part was called the Byzantine Empire. I don’t know if “Romans” ever fought “Byzantines” (Eastern Romans) but this is a cartoon.
15. Arab Caliph: Speaking of cartoons, what did an Arab Caliph look like? This was my best guess.
16. Crusader: After Crusaders went a-killin’ in the name of Jesus Christ, they established Crusader states, most notably the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
17. Mamluk of Egypt: Wikipedia sez, “Over time, mamluks became a powerful military caste in various Muslim societies…In places such as Egypt from the Ayyubid dynasty to the time of Muhammad Ali of Egypt, mamluks were considered to be “true lords”, with social status above freeborn Muslims.” And apparently, they controlled Palestine for a while.
18. Ottoman Turk: Did I mention this is a cartoon? Probably no one went to battle looking like this. But big turbans, rich clothing, and jewelry seemed to be in vogue among Ottoman Turkish elites, according to paintings I found on the Internet.
19. Arab: A gross generalization of a generic 19th-century “Arab”.
20. British: The British formed alliances with Arabs, and then occupied Palestine. This cartoon is an oversimplification and uses this British caricature as a stand-in for Europeans in general.
21. Palestinian: The British occupied this guy’s land, only to leave it to a vast influx of….
22. European Jew/Zionist: Desperate and traumatized survivors of European pogroms and death camps, Jewish Zionist settlers were ready to fight to the death for a place to call home, but…
23. PLO/Hamas/Hezbollah: ….so were the people that lived there. Various militarized resistance movements arose in response to Israel: The Palestinian Liberation Organization, Hamas, and Hezbollah.
24. State of Israel: Backed by “the West,” especially the US, they got lots of weapons and the only sanctioned nukes in the region.
25. Guerrilla/Freedom Fighter/Terrorist: Sometimes people fight in military uniforms, sometimes they don’t. Creeping up alongside are illicit nukes possibly from Iran or elsewhere in the region. Who’s Next?
26. The Angel of Death: The real hero of the Old Testament, and right now too.

Release Date: 2012
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🔗 All Credit To Nina Paley: https://blog.ninapaley.com/2012/10/01/this-land-is-mine/