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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This clip is so funny! I laughed and laughed and laughed… Can’t wait for the one about Europe 1939-1945! Another stupid affair, stupid sapients killing each other for nothing!! They should’ve all just make peace! Stupid Poles fighting against the Germans, Stupid Churchill dragging his unwilling country to the bloody war against peaceful German Socialists! Ha-ha! I’m so smart and high-minded! I’m so far above all this! Ha-ha! Who was killing who(m) there, in Europe, in the 20th century? And the 19th? 18th? and for the previous thousand years or two? Ha-ha, stu-pid! Worthless strip of land, Europe!
And North America, how funny! The Whitey came and killed off 20,000,000 Natives, ha-ha! Worthless piece of land, the USA! Stu-pid people kill themselves over this land! The native Americans should’ve just rolled over and give up! and the Poles in 1939 too! And the French in 1940! and Jews in 1948! Wait, what? They all did, except for the Jews of Israel? These Jews are so obstinate and haughty! How dare they, to fight over that strip of worthless land, the USA!!! I mean, Europe!!!! Wait, ….
@Michael Pyshnov be consistent, dear. Nuremberg tribunal was a fraud perpetrated by victorious war criminals, one of which was perpetrator of mass death on scale not much less than Nazi death camps – the USSR, which carried out the Katyn massacre – one of many, many more – of which it accused the German Nazis as perpetrating at same Nuremberg tribunal!
And the US/Brits with their campaigns of burning city after city, killing 130,000 in one night by torching Tokyo, Dresden, (and later vitrification of Hiroshima and Nagasaki)… Complicit in Nazi genocide because they just would not spare EVEN ONE bomb – no matter the pleas of The Mighty Jewish Lobby – to bomb either the gas chambers or the railways leading to them – and even such railways that lead to the front if they were also used by transports to the gas chambers!
And it was the fraud and the sham because it let the German Nazis off mostly scot-free. Not one common member of einsatzgruppen was prosecuted. Why, they all were following orders, naturally! Countless SS-men were let free or given few years, and pardoned in the end, instead of being shot on sight – each and every one of them. Most ridiculous new crimes were invented, like transferring a population or removing the villages supportive of the guerrilla fighters. The problem was not that villages were removed that served as terrorist bases (from the viewpoint of the military power in charge) – but that their population were most always killed, instead of been provided new housing in the cities.
The problem was not the “de-por-ta-tions” of the Jews, but WHERE they were been deported TO. Namely, the gas chambers. Deportation, to the area were your people leave, govern themselves, speak your language and have same religion as you do – what could have been a better fate for the Jews, and the Gypsies (yes, Gypsies – Roma is just one clan among them) under the Nazis. Give me the deportation of European Jews to their Homeland any day, instead of gas chambers (or 32,000 men, women and children being machine-gunned over a ravine in two days)!
And for the descendants of Arabian invaders too, all throughout the Arab Occupied – since 7th century CE – Middle East and Northern Africa! Syria was never Arab before Arabian invasion; nor Lebanon, Mesopotamia or Land of Israel or Libya or Egypt. The descendants of invaders have no right to prevent the natives from resettling there and reestablishing their self-government. And there are plenty millions native people in diaspora right now from Syria, and Iraq, and Lebanon, all throughout the world. And if the invaders refuse, violently, the natives’ Right of Return, and native Syrians or native Lebanese push back the oppressors – more power to them!
The truth stares you right back in your face from the World Map: the 23 remnants of the Great Arabian 7-th century Jihadi Conquest Empire are all still part of same Empire – in heart and mind and culture and aspirations and myths and common bigotry and racism and Jew-hatred and wild conspiracy theories – even if governed separately. But the Homeland of Arabs is Arabia. All the rest is occupied territory.
So dear, be consistent.
The many cheers this little piece of sh1t of a video receives from Arab guests here in the comments (*) is directly symptomatic of its sh1tty qualities. It is a great aid to the forces of Evil. Any Arab black propaganda department couldn’t have done one better. Or maybe it did?
(*) (and proof they don’t really care for this Land at all, which they knowingly falsely claim for their own, even if it’s called by a word foreign to their language which they can’t even properly pronounce – for there’s no p’ in the Arabic! – p’lestin meaning INVADERS, in Hebrew).
Great! How about a shorter version for the Americas???
This land is full of mines 🙂 As is the topic… Maybe we can just have a massive, worldwide pillow fight about it, and resolve it once and for all. Your work is genius, the clip hilariously tragic, and your Malach HaMavet such a cheeky-looking bugger. I want a poster!
Let me rephrase myself. You’ve got a seriously bad karma coming your way for floating up this despicable shit. All the idiots here congratulating themselves… Despicable immoral bunch. Fuck off!
Hint for raging Helen: “Animated short by Nina Paley satirizes divine claims to Palestine”. I want you to read the words “DIVINE CLAIMS” at least three times. That’s what this song is about and you obviously missed its point. Still, nice amount of rage, I envy your amount of free time. Cheers!
Nina, You don’t understand the modern history of the area.
What a amazing fabulous piece of work! Keep it up you have my full support! I can imagine these characters in a pop up children’s book to teach them history!
Take care G x
You are so talented and very creative! I wish I learned history this way at school instead of reading lots of boring books! So much fun! (even if the content shows war, it’s a historical fact!)
Describing the state of Israel soldier, giving them a Kalachnikov is a mistake.
Early days no one sold weapon to the state of Israel so they invent their own weapon called UZI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzi
later, on the 60’s it was the GALIL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galil
then. provided by the American support, the famous M16
and nowdays its the new weapon developed in Israel, the Tavor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavor
(Sorry for my English mistakes, and this just bothered me since i’m an Israeli soldier)
One more thing. Australian sarcasm-rock band TISM had a great solution in the early ’90s. All the countries which are the subject of conflict are small compared with Australia, which has a lot of space it doesn’t really use.
Andy Williams sounds a bit like Seth McFarlane, so at first it sounded like some Family Guy nonsense.
Truth be told, it oversimplifies the issue. But whatever, still amusing.
Thank you for your work, Nina. Please don’t be discouraged by fools.
Thank God that not all Jews are like Rachel and Helen.
That’s why not all people in the world are antisemites.
Many problems. Historically as well. But well done.
marvelous video, really. it’s a class of history. congratulations and tank you for this great production!
Folks looking for historic accuracy should read some book…
As an illustration, this is perfectly fit.
And that lovely Angel of Death, oh, my…
Great work, Nancy, kudos for that!
Brilliant. Savagely funny. And so true. So many who bemoan the unrest of that area’s inhabitants neglect to recall this bloodletting is as old as time, because it’s happening in the cradle of so-called civilization. And for one of the oldest reasons: land claims. The cavemen fought over women and land first. “This is mine, it’s not yours” is human(un)kind’s oldest reason for wars.
in fact the Bysantines never fought Romans – they were Romans themselves. But in early 7’th century Jerusalem was briefly conquired by Persians, and that grey guy can be Persian as well.
Two things:
1. You forgot the Persians who were in Israel for about two hundred years in between the Babylonians and the Greeks…
2. Not sure why you repeatedly “apologize” in your blog for drawing what are very flattering cartoons of “Arabs”, but don’t even say a word about your grotesque antisemitic caricatures of Jews. Self-hater?
Helen: you really don’t want to see, do you?
Of course fighting for territory is human nature and happened everywhere. The point is that land claims are ridiculous, especially when backed by some old book written by God-knows-who. Everyone has one of those books. They all say that land is their land. Everybody can make claims about everywhere. Eventually people realize who loses a round of thermo-nuclear war: everybody.
Helen seems to have a bug up her butt, and a problem with a spastic colon.
May I suggest that intelligent debate might be more conducive to changing hearts and minds then ignorant cursing.
This is beautiful. Comments here are not. People who actually think this video is mocking or making fun of the struggles, just because it is animated (a “cartoon”) it doesn’t mean it’s supposed to be funny. Grow up a bit, this is tragic. I almost cried. Yes it “puts things in perspective”, but instead of making them smaller, it makes a pile of corpses. I don’t know about everyone here, but I don’t go “oh, stu-pid people killing eachother for a worthless piece of land”, I just stare at the dead people. People like me, as human and full of feelings and pride as I am. I don’t think of the wars on the videos as “silly” mistakes, but as unavoidable tragedies. After so many died for that land, after so many groups of people were hurt, it’s hard to just let it go. So it makes peace seem far off, war neverending, people dying in vain, moreso since there will never be a winner. And that’s not funny. It also doesn’t speak of the PalestineIsrael land. It speaks of mankind. People come on, stop looking at the cartoony characters and thinking about aliens, exotic cultures who do war. It’s you in there. It’s us.
Also, Helen. Girl. You’re right, a video of the wars in other parts of the world would be great, and as educational as this one. I for one would love if someone made a rough animation of the history of the land I live on. You apparently don’t. In fact, all your historical-names-facts-and-dates-throwing going on and on about how your people should own this land and not Arabs and how they are monsters makes you seem like a cartoon character. The cartoony men on the video are one-dimensional, I had hoped real people were not. You give off the image I think you dislike, of a rage-blinded war perpetuater, blood-thirsty, juvenile and obsessed. It makes your struggle seem silly.
Now, last of all, people who complain this is historically innacurate. This is a rough image, showing what happened in THOUSANDS OF YEARS in the duration of a single song. People are represented by caricatures this is not a history book or a history movie. This is artistic. The feeling of innumerous people dying on the same piece of soil is depicted.
Sorry for the WALL OF TEXT, and commenting on everything, I just want to tell Nina this really shows the work and I find this touching.
This video is just brilliant, in design and execution and in message. Nina, you are amazing. I was not aware of your work until I came across this.
I am equally amazed at the flood of small minded racist jerks who are finding fault with this because it doesn’t match their own (narrow) world view. The actual conflicts fleetingly referred to here just do not matter – the particulars are not the point.
If the races depicted here were all swapped out for warring clans from the planet Tralfamadore, the message would be just as valid.
Critics: If you are offended by the racial/historical/political bias you think you see in this video, then you know what? YOU are just yet another small minded, racist jerk. Take a clue from the video – all those smug faces of righteous certainty are YOU.
Ten thumbs (I have great hands) way up!
AMAZING….
I LOLed when the first Egyptian was killed and his sun deity was replaced by that of his Assyrian killer. It reinforces the religious psychology behind the troubles of the region and cements its reputation as the world’s leading argument in favor of atheism.
Helen- (noun) see ‘idiot’.
Helen,
Stop trolling the message boards you swine. Great video and very creative. Please do one of the US of A!
I found this video animation blasphemous, sick, violent, simplistic, mocking and offensive. So I sent it to my list, hoping some would laugh as much as I did. Using Exodus to stick it to the current God given rulers of the land – brilliant! Congrats Nina, you are a treasure.
I have just one word for this film. Hilarious!
@Rachel
For someone from an Ivy League University (sorry, “IV League” – guess that’s where the druggies hang out) you seem to have terrible trouble writing coherent English. I never realised American education had reached such a low ebb.
You suggest to Michael Pyshnov:
“OK so stop using facbook, computers, medicine ect’. they all were developed by Jews!
160 NOBEL prize winners are jews! much more then from any other nation in the world! (there are only 15 milion jews=160 nobel prizes, there are 1.5 bilion muslims=6 prizes).”
160 Nobel Prizewinners may well have been Jews, but they were only able to obtain those Nobel prizes by working in countries whose cultures valued such things as science and medical research above the creation of advanced weaponry. Could Mark Zuckerberg have invented Facebook if he’d been living in Israel? Don’t make me laugh: the only computer research encouraged in Israel is the creation of sophisticated computer viruses. Jews did not “invent” computers, and most certainly did not “invent” medicine. (Antiseptics? Penicillin? Anaesthesia? Oh, wait, all non-Jewish Brits.) They did, however, invent psychoanalysis and the atomic bomb: fair’s fair.
You refer to Jews as a “nation”, but if you look at those born or resident in Israel there is a grand total of ten Nobels, (three of them Peace Prizes awarded jointly with Arabs). What was Israel doing for the 56 years of its existence before it produced a Nobel science laureate? Anything apart form killing people?
@Peter Morris- I am one of the critics you refer to and I assure you I am not a ‘small minded racist jerk.’ I don’t know if you read my comment on the 1st page but as a fellow artist and animator, and person who knows about this regions history, I was merely attempting an honest critique of her work. If it came across otherwise, let me clarify what I meant.
I understand the message behind the film. I think it’s well done. Incidentally there are MANY Israelis who agree with Nina and would applaud this film, including my own family there, and from what I’ve seen a lot of commentators on the previous pages here.
Furthering that point, I’ve seen several animated films by Israeli animators that protest their own army’s actions against the Palestinians. I’m not saying I agree or disagree but it’s a legitimate topic for debate that people in that part of the world are well aware of.
I don’t support Nina being called a ‘self hating Jew’. Clearly she cares about what’s going on there. A self-hating Jew wouldn’t make this film. They’d more likely pretend the issue didn’t concern them.
I am mainly concerned about a couple of things in Nina’s presentation because I can see it being used as fodder by those who wish to see Israel destroyed. I am not saying Nina wants that but I feel in this day and age, with tensions heightening in the middle east, words should be chosen carefully when addressing this issue. Otherwise you’ll get people chiming in to make corrections. Then again, you might get that anyway. 🙂
I was referring to the way Nina worded the ‘guide to who’s killing who’. I understand she needs to keep it brief but the way she worded it seems to rewrite history in an inaccurate way. It makes it seem like the Jews came there only after Holocaust and stole the land they now live on from the native Palestinians. That is just not the case. Many people think it is, and may wish it were the case, but it’s simply not. Sorry.
The same point Nina tries to make can be made without rewriting history. I know it can. I’ve seen it done.
The other thing I said about the way she designed the European Jewish character was merely an artistic critique. A guy who dresses like that would not have supported Zionism back then. A character looking like this
http://tinyurl.com/9eql4et
would be more accurate…
Shalom.
“It makes it seem like the Jews came there only after Holocaust and stole the land they now live on from the native Palestinians.”
It’s no more revisionist to say that Palestinians were expelled by the hundreds of thousands from their homeland by the young Israeli state than it is to say that Jews in the Arab world were expelled by the hundreds of thousands from _their_ homelands by nationalist Arab states.
@Randy-
“It’s no more revisionist to say that Palestinians were expelled by the hundreds of thousands from their homeland by the young Israeli state than it is to say that Jews in the Arab world were expelled by the hundreds of thousands from _their_ homelands by nationalist Arab states.”
Of course what you’re saying is more revisionist because it’s not true. Regardless, you’re misreading what I said. I wasn’t even referring to that. See my earlier point which you also answered. I’m specifically referring to the vast majority of the land settled by Zionists since the late 1800’s which is now Israel proper. I’m not talking about West Bank or Gaza. The area I’m referring to was mostly swamp or desert and the Zionists made it livable. They didn’t take that land from anyone. There was no one to take it from. Unless you’re talking about mosquitoes or lizards, but that’s a whole other cartoon that needs to be made.
haunting … i have chills down my spine ….
Thank You, Nina Paley!
Hey, Nina! Great work! Im writing from Spain. I am cartoonist myself and I also teach History in English in bilingual secondary schools here in Spain and I am going to use this resource (lyric + characters + video) in my lessons. If you want to know the “lesson plan” we will use, Ill be glad to send it to you.
Keep on creating beautiful stuff like this!!
A lot of death and bloodshed over a barren strip of land where hardly a blade of grass exists…..all over the say-so of imaginary sky fairies who allegedly handed this desert over to two different peoples….bad case of double booking….someone better take the blame up there!!
“The descendants of invaders have no right to prevent the natives from resettling there and reestablishing their self-government.”
The Jews weren’t the natives, they were invaders as well, as the cartoon correctly depicts.
@Chaim,
you’re not a small-minded racist jew, yet you lie straight faced!! so Israel proper was not livable and had only mosquitos? pretty powerful mosquitos that stood in the face of Napoleon in Akko. They also build what’s now a UNESCO heritage site, the old city of Acre, not what your people bloomed. Those super mosquitos also managed to build educational institues that Arabs from the neighborhood came to learn at, that is before your bloom. Jaffa used to be the capital of culture and education in the region with theaters and cinemas, now it’s just a dirty drug-stricken neighborhood of Tel Aviv thanks to you. Anyone who’d come to visit your fake country would see the power of mosquitos. Tourists don’t come to see your glass tall buildings dear, they come to see what everyone else had built there, that is not yours.
superb! … only objection, though i know it’s a cartoon: the mamluks were white slaves brought to Egypt and trained and educated militarily, so they could have been a bit whiter…
Great work beautifully drawn with great use of music. And with a deep message, too. Thanks for your video, and keep working.
Nina, its brillliant, beautiful and so true. ignore the quibblers, but do going on making some more brilliant political cartoons. Malach HaMavet is superb!
The Bible didn’t say that the last will be the first… it is the New Testament
Awful clip! A pity you invested time in this…
I am glad there are so many people here that are able to point out all the inaccuracies in what claims to be a scientifc historical documentary movie about the middle east. I mean – if it were a piece of art, a cartoon – one could forgive a little bit of artistic license and simplifications to get a message across.
But after all this is the website of the history channel and not the website of a cartoonist.