I envisioned This Land Is Mine as the last scene of my potential-possible-maybe- feature film, Seder-Masochism, but it’s the first (and so far only) scene I’ve animated. As the Bible says, “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
This Land Is Mine from Nina Paley on Vimeo.
Who’s Killing Who? A Viewer’s Guide
Because you can’t tell the players without a pogrom!
Early Man
This generic “cave man” represents the first human settlers in Israel/Canaan/the Levant. Whoever they were.
Canaanite
What did ancient Canaanites look like? I don’t know, so this is based on ancient Sumerian art.
Egyptian
Canaan was located between two huge empires. Egypt controlled it sometimes, and…
Assyrian
….Assyria controlled it other times.
Israelite
The “Children of Israel” conquered the shit out of the region, according to bloody and violent Old Testament accounts.
Babylonian
Then the Baylonians destroyed their temple and took the Hebrews into exile.
Macedonian/Greek
Here comes Alexander the Great, conquering everything!
Greek/Macedonian
No sooner did Alexander conquer everything, than his generals divided it up and fought with each other.
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.)
Seleucid
More Greek-Macedonian legacies of Alexander.
Hebrew Priest
This guy didn’t fight, he just ran the Second Temple re-established by Hebrews in Jerusalem after the Babylonian Exile.
Maccabee
Led by Judah “The Hammer” Maccabee, who fought the Seleucids, saved the Temple, and invented Channukah. Until…
Roman
….the Romans destroyed the Second Temple and absorbed the region into the Roman Empire…
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.
Arab Caliph
Speaking of cartoon, what did an Arab Caliph look like? This was my best guess.
Crusader
After Crusaders went a-killin’ in the name of Jesus Christ, they established Crusader states, most notably the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
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.[7]” And apparently they controlled Palestine for a while.
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.
Arab
A gross generalization of a generic 19-century “Arab”.
British
The British formed alliances with Arabs, then occupied Palestine. This cartoon is an oversimplification, and uses this British caricature as a stand-in for Europeans in general.
Palestinian
The British occupied this guy’s land, only to leave it to a vast influx of….
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…
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.
State of Israel
Backed by “the West,” especially the US, they got lots of weapons and the only sanctioned nukes in the region.
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?
and finally…
The Angel of Death
The real hero of the Old Testament, and right now too.
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We know where every character in the movie is from, what it roots is
but do we know the roots of the Palestinian ? where did they came from ?
I had the Persians after the Babylonians. Love the video and your other work.
In 539 BC, the Neo-Babylonian Empire fell to Cyrus the Great, king of Persia, with a military engagement known as the Battle of Opis
Cyrus later issued a decree permitting captive people,
including the Jews, to return to their own land
(as explained in 2 Chronicles 36), to allow their temple to be rebuilt back in Jerusalem.
We have a holiday about this you know?
Love your work, Nina! Look forward to a Youtube world history channel illustrated by you.
Nina, I love your film and am very happy for you. It’s done in brilliant chronological order. Not sure if we’re related but there aren’t many Paley’s.
Very well thought out and produced. Score is perfect for the images. Incredibly original. In an age of net blurps and clips, this one really stood out to me more than anything in years.
What Chaim said. The facts are grossly oversimplified.
https://blog.ninapaley.com/2012/10/01/this-land-is-mine/comment-page-1/#comment-53614
After Canaanite you need to add Sea people or representing them Peleset. and indeed there was fight between roman emperors.
it should be noted that there was more then one “caveman” in caves in this region are skeletons of neandertals who most likely mated with “us” and maybe did some clubbing of one another
I hit this video on a swiss online journal and i have to say i am really amazed by it, it is really a great deal of work!
Your video shows no reality, Canaanites are arab dynasty and you show them white skin…then you show all MUSLIMS in your video as negroes…What shit of your racism….Palestine is for Muslims and Arabs for ever… not for shit Israel
You see, the “Palestinian” as a people never existed. During Turkish and British occupation ALL subjects were Palestinians – arabs, jews, druse, christians etc etc. My family’s birth certificates states that we were Palestinians before 1948 and Israelis after that. It’s not always ideal to simplify history.
Great! Now try to make one about the Balkans! 🙂
For all the people with anger: do you know what’s irony mean?
At the end of this small movie, we all se who the winner is: death (if the conflict is going further)
Perfectly simplifies the complex and ongoing cultural/political history of the region, as a surrogate for the human species at large.
Perfectly simplifies the complex and ongoing cultural/political history of the region – a surrogate for human nature at large.
Oh nooo … viral again! Love this piece when it first came out. Used to look forward to your comics in the Santa Cruz weekly (was it the Good Times or Metro?). And now, reading though some of the comments, it seems that you’ve created a sure-fire way of diagnosing those in need of a cranialrectalectomy. Kudos!
Dear Ms. Paley,
I understand that you have no idea of the history of Jewish People and the history of Israel. Before preparing that kind of a “movie” you should have knowledge of what are you doing and why do you put everything in that abusive forms. I would assume that this is your the very first so called “movie” and I would definitely recommend from legal point of view to make it the last one.
Good grief Irina … of course Nina knows the history of the Jewish people. Obviously you didn’t watch her film.
Irina, The artist has not engaged in anything illegal. So why in the world would you say that, “from a legal point of view”, she’d better make this her last film? That really doesn’t sound right at all.
Well done. Insert a depiction of the Persians between the Babylonians and the Greeks, and it will be flawless 🙂
A Note to Dear Ms. Irina (and others who with profound understanding disorder): I think everyone is well aware of the Jewish history … it is the present and future they are worried about, especially that last scene 🙁
Please go ahead. I liked the every second of it and distributed.
The amazing thing about this short video is that it doesn’t really require you to speak the language which I believe Irina does not. If you understand english well you immediately get the irony of the situation. People have been slaughtering each other for millennia over this same piece of dirt, God or no.
Is there any land that the same theme can be written for? It does not mean that current occupants cannot live in peace. The two-state solution would seem to be an answer for Israel and the Jordanians.
Quite possibly the best video on youtube. Without a doubt the truest and funniest (and saddest too 🙁 )
Irina, you seem to have no idea how to use google (or look around a website). Nina has made many films since 1998
http://www.ninapaley.com/filmography.html
And she is working on an ‘animated movie telling the story of Exodus, narrated by recordings of real Passover Seders’ which sounds pretty Jewish to me.
Thanks for finally talking about > This Land Is Mine « Nina Paley’s Blog < Loved it!
my blog post – עבר לכ×ן
So true!!
As much as I loved the video, I have to make a few suggestions:
1) Between Babylonian and Greek, there should really be a Persian.
Persians are important part of history of the region, they were the ones who defeated Babylonians and later released Jews from slavery. Persian empire was destroyed by Alexander.
2)There indeed never was a battle between Romans and Byzantines.
You could insert another character between them, representing various nomadic tribes who kept attacking Rome and later Byzantine.
3) You might want to switch Ottoman Turk with 19th century Arab.
Arabs were conquered by Turks, then British Defeated Turks, and Arabs were serving in British Army.
4) The Arabs described as PLO/Hamas/Hezbollah, could also be described as Egypt/Jordan/Iraq/Lebanon, those were the ones who waged half a dozen wars against Israel.
The Description “PLO/Hamas/Hezbollah” could be moved onto masked terrorists in the end.
5) Just for the fun of it, another potential character to add would be Napoleon Bonaparte.
He tried to take the region from the Mameluke Turks. He did not succeed, but left quite an impression.
It certainly makes a the point.
Brilliant but pity she forgot the US participation. I think it was an individual called Einstein who said that “human stupidity is infinite”. What a clever man!!
Reading the comments I see some people consider the murderous mess confined to one small corner of the Middle East. Viewing from my homeland in Turkey, I can assure you it extends all the way north through Syria, Iraq, and into my country. And yes, the US is a major player, understandably neglected in this otherwise brilliant film probably because of its behind-the-scene style of participation.
The character of PLO/HAMAS/ HEZBOALLAH is not correct. that cartoon represents the Arab Army of 1948. Then, the clip mistakenly shows Hamas and resistance (the last character you call terrorist) with same weapons as Israel army, which is a bit misleading.
Almost perfect! Just two repairs: Israelite and Assyrian should be exchanged in their positions, and there should be a Persian between the Babylonian and the first Macedonian.
Almost perfect! Just two repairs: Assyrian should come after Israelite, and a Persian should be between the Babylonian and the first Macedonian.