This Land is Mine

This Land Is Mine from Nina Paley.

Who’s Killing Who? A Viewer’s Guide

Early Man
This generic “cave man” represents the first human settlers in Israel/Canaan/the Levant. Whoever they were.

Early Man

Canaanite
What did ancient Canaanites look like? I don’t know, so this is based on ancient Sumerian art.

Canaanite

Egyptian
Canaan was located between two huge empires. Egypt controlled it sometimes, and

Ancient Egyptian

Assyrian
….Assyria controlled it other times.

Assyrian

Israelite
The “Children of Israel” conquered the shit out of the region, according to bloody and violent Old Testament accounts.

Israelite

Babylonian
Then the Baylonians destroyed their temple and took the Hebrews into exile.

Babylonian

Macedonian/Greek
Here comes Alexander the Great, conquering everything!

Macedonian/Alexander

Greek/Macedonian
No sooner did Alexander conquer everything, than his generals divided it up and fought with each other.

Greek

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.)

Ptolmaic

Seleucid
More Greek-Macedonian legacies of Alexander.

Seleucid

Hebrew Priest
This guy didn’t fight, he just ran the Second Temple re-established by Hebrews in Jerusalem after the Babylonian Exile.

Hebrew Priest

Maccabee
Led by Judah “The Hammer” Maccabee, who fought the Seleucids, saved the Temple, and invented Channukah. Until…

Maccabee

Roman
….the Romans destroyed the Second Temple and absorbed the region into the Roman Empire…

Roman

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.

Byzantine

Arab Caliph
Speaking of cartoon, what did an Arab Caliph look like? This was my best guess.

Caliph

Crusader
After Crusaders went a-killin’ in the name of Jesus Christ, they established Crusader states, most notably the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Crusader

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.

Egyptian Mamluk

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.

Ottoman Turk

Arab
A gross generalization of a generic 19-century “Arab”.

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.

British

Palestinian
The British occupied this guy’s land, only to leave it to a vast influx of….

Palestinian

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…

European Jew/Zionist

PLO/Hamas/Hezbollah
….so were the people that lived there. Various militarized resistance movements arose in response to Israel: The Palestinian Liberation OrganizationHamas, and Hezbollah.

Hezbollah
State of Israel
Guerrilla/Freedom Fighter/Terrorist

State of Israel
Backed by the United States

2 thoughts on “This Land is Mine

  1. Rob Arnold says:

    Powerful rendition.

    For all of it, which shows that no land has changed hands without bloodshed, and lots of it, throughout human history, what the state of Israel ultimately comes down to is much more recent. After a full two year study, with a tome of evidence, primarily archaeological, the United Nations, in 1948, voted. It was 33-13 vote, with ten abstentions. It was MANDATED that the land belonged to the Jewish people.

    Attacked by all sides (apparently the Arab world cared nothing at all for that democratic process in a world body), Israel won wars against insurmountable odds. Any land won in those wars belongs to the Jewish State. If they are thought to be trespassers, not the rightful owners, then no one, nowhere, are the rightful owners of any land at all, given that not a scrap of land on earth was not won/lost by way of war at some point or another.

    Much of the land in question here was occupied by snakes and lizards, unwanted. Samuel Clemons (Twain) wrote extensively on the matter.

    Leave the Jew the hell alone and there is peace in the region. Israel is not a conquering nation, and has made countless efforts at peace. In the summer of 2000, for instance, then Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Barack, offered wholly 94% of the land in question to the Palestinians, sovereign control over all of it, and half of Jerusalem, with a Palestinian capitol there. The angry rejection of those massive concessions is but one example of Yassir Arafat swallowing olive branches whole, and crapping them out. And Arafat is but one example of such occurrences.

    The marauding butchery of October 7, 2023, is the latest example of the savage nature of Islamic extremists hellbent on death to the “Little Satan”, as they eye the “Great Satan” and conspire to make September 11, 2001 look like a day at the zoo. They hate deeply, and, next to them, Israel is pure as the driven snow. And so, too, is the United States of America.

    Long Live Israel.

    In the final analysis the land is no where near as pertinent as is hate, hatred of the Jew. Israel certainly is not innocent of any wrongdoing, but the PLO was never, ever a partner in peace.

  2. Bobby from Nassau says:

    … and the BARBARIC HEINOUS ATROCITIES of HAMAS, HEZBOLLAH and the proxy war funding by the IRANIAN MULLAHS against the nation of Israel … speaks volumes about the centuries-ingrained genetic disposition of JEW-HATRED by radical Muslim jihaddist terrorist organizations!
    Islam … the “RELIGION OF PEACE???”
    Since September 11, 2001 … there have been over FORTY-FOUR THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED murderous incidents of ISLAMIC TERRORISM worldwide!!!!
    Just think about that for a moment … FORTY-FOUR THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED incidents… not deaths… but INCIDENTS of ISLAMIC TERROR!!!
    Every incident fully documented on this website …
    https://thereligionofpeace.com/

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