This animated short by Nina Paley—in the tradition of the best Monty Python music skits—might not be an orthodox history lesson, but it’s an accurate depiction of the horrible 6,000-year bloodshed in the region of Palestine, with dozens of tribes and nations fighting each other to claim ownership of that land.
Here is a summary on who is killing who in order of appearance—you can see the complete commentary at Paley’s blog:
Early Man
Canaanite
Egyptian
Assyrian
Israelite
Babylonian
Macedonian/Greek
Greek/Macedonian
Ptolemaic
Seleucid
Hebrew Priest
Maccabee
Roman
Byzantine
Arab Caliph
Crusader
Mamluk of Egypt
Ottoman Turk
Arab
British
Palestinian
European Jew/Zionist
PLO/Hamas/Hezbollah
State of Israel
Guerrilla/Freedom Fighter/Terrorist
and finally…
The Angel of Death
The situation has always been so ridiculously bad and bloody that seeing it like this is hilarious. This fight of thousands of years for a tiny piece of dry land that nobody has ever really owned just doesn’t make any sense at all.—Ed.
