The cycle of violence– set to ‘Exodus’ anthem

by on October 5, 2012 33
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This Land Is Mine from Nina Paley on Vimeo.

This video by the cartoonist Nina Paley is getting passed around. It features the Exodus song, This Land Is Mine, sung by the late Andy Williams. Thanks to Sheila Rechtschaffer and others.

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in Israel/Palestine

{ 33 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. Ismail says:
    October 5, 2012 at 9:45 am

    So what’s this? A clever way to repeat the tired trope that the present problem in Palestine is nothing more than the latest expression of an eternal, anhistorical, apolitical struggle that mysteriously has plagued this region since the beginning of time. Another version of the “equivalence” analysis; one side’s interchangeable with another. Palestine and Israel? Just the latest iteration of Assyrians battling Hebrews, etc. Plus ca change…

    What can one do but throw up one’s hands?

    Not my view, nor, I think, the view of most posters here. I think Palestine and Israel struggle for specific and unique reasons, not because they are the latest actors in an eternal drama.

    And I think there’s a right side and a wrong side.

    • Rusty Pipes says:
      October 5, 2012 at 4:01 pm

      If the video were just illustrating the point that group after group has fought over this piece of land, it might be dismissed as a version of the “equivalence” analysis. However, with the zionist hasbara theme from “Exodus” in the background (and sung by each conqueror), it challenges not only anyone who claims that God is a real estate broker, but particularly the Zionist use of that theme. Especially with the spectre of death and mushroom clouds in the closing, this is an effective tool for cracking through the shallow support for Israel among average (non-fundamentalist) Americans. America’s support for religious-extremist Zionism is leading the world down the path to WWIIII.

    • Inanna says:
      October 5, 2012 at 10:02 pm

      @Ismail, I think you’re pissed off because what this video shows is (to paraphrase Said) that the Jews have neither the only claim nor the superior claim to the land.

      • Ismail says:
        October 6, 2012 at 10:33 am

        Inanna, why would you say that? I think you misunderstood me. To be specific, right side =Palestine, wrong side =Israel.

        Also, I’m not pissed off at all. I offered my reading of a film which I believe offers an incorrect view of the sources of struggle in Palestine, that’s all.

        And I believe that Jews have neither the only claim nor the superior claim to Palestine.

        And of course, I believe that Zionists have NO claim to Palestine, if that helps.

        • W.Jones says:
          October 6, 2012 at 11:35 pm

          I went to sleep right after seeing this clip and had a nightmare.

          In the clip, isn’t it a Moses figure out of Egypt with North African skin and a beard who declares the land is his and then he is killed by a Babylonian, referring to the Babylonian conquest? Then an Egyptian is portrayed as coming and taking the land and himself being replaced by a Persian?

          I think the message is that Moses began by saying it was his land but it ended up being said by the grim reaper.

          But in fact, in the Bible, doesn’t the story go that Abraham was a tribesman in the Holy Land along with other native Palestinians like himself, and then his descendant Jacob, AKA Israel, moved to Egypt. Then a descendant of the group in Egypt, Moses, returned as conquerors back to the Holy Land. So in fact it appears there was an Abrahamic group as old as Moses’ group in the Holy Land whom Moses conquered.

          What do you think?

  2. jawad says:
    October 5, 2012 at 10:27 am

    Ismael, I like it. It is a call for actions. These crazies are going to nuke the world if we dont stop them. It is a lot more impactful than any good-vs-evil video I have seen. The standard equivalence trope never says any of the following

    1. The exodus narrative is full of shit. God did not give the land to anyone
    2. Its not just two parties locked in battle. Many parties have come and gone.
    3. Sometimes its Jews annihilating other. Sometimes Jews slaughtering Jews.
    4. White people and Western Civ are not innocent bystanders but active participants
    5. Maybe this is not a ME story but a global story.
    etc

  3. LanceThruster says:
    October 5, 2012 at 4:50 pm

    Pretty creative. It’s got a “Triumph of the Mine” quality in that it can update continuously to that point the struggle between top dog and disgruntled 2nd place becomes a final solution.

  4. freespeechlover says:
    October 5, 2012 at 6:39 pm

    I disagree that this video represents the kind of “two sides” or the state of Israel and the Palestinians are political equivalents of each other. I suppose that’s one way to read it, but I think that’s tendentious. I read it about how Palestine has been claimed and conquered by many historical forces, and that the kind of heady nationalism founded on exclusive claims to the land has left a very bloody history.

    After all, the PLO’s original vision as well as Arab vision, going back to WWI, was of Palestine as composed of Muslims, Christians and Jews, since all three had been there for centuries.

  5. Vacy says:
    October 5, 2012 at 7:50 pm

    Meanwhile women stand by and weep over the graves of children…ad infinitum.

  6. RoHa says:
    October 5, 2012 at 8:51 pm

    In the British vs. Turks bit, the Turkish soliders don’t look anything like Turkish soldiers of the time.

  7. W.Jones says:
    October 5, 2012 at 9:53 pm

    The headline here motivated me to see “Exodus.” In the early part of the movie, the heroic organizers of the Exodus boat in Cyprus see a jeep that belongs to the leader of the Church there. They confidently instruct their Greek friend to steal the jeep and give it to them. He solemnly crosses himself, looks at the jeep, and shrugs.
    link to youtube.com
    Do you think there is a deeper meaning the author was conveying? It seems strange to me the person would shrug after acting so solemn.

    I guess most people would feel I was reading too much into it, but I think well-thought out literature often has deeper connotations.

    • jawad says:
      October 6, 2012 at 1:44 am

      It motivated me to go see Exodus also. Someday. I dont have Netflix where I live. I hope that this video motivates people to see Sita Sings The Blues. It is absolutely brilliant. My favorite movie of all time. And Paley is a champion of free speech and gives away her movie for free.

      In a way this reminded me of Michael Moore’s Roger and Me. Great movie by a great fim maker, but the final scene is a bonus piece of pro-Palestinian genius.

    • ckg says:
      October 6, 2012 at 12:12 pm

      I haven’t see the film Exodus but I am reminded of Finkelstein’s estimate of Leon Uris’ novel in Beyond Chutzpah:

      Putting aside its apolgetics for Zionism, the sheer racism of Uris’s blockbuster [Exodus] bears recalling. The Arabs, their villages, their homes–to the last, they’re “stinking” or engulfed in “overwhelming stench” and “vile odors.” Arab men just “lay around” all day “listless”–that is when they’re not hatching “some typical double-dealing scheme which seemed perfectly legitimate to the Arab,” or resorting to the “unscrupulous ethics of the Arab…the fantastic reasoning that condoned every crime short of murder,” or “becom[ing] hysterical at the slightest provacation”…”There was little song or laughter or joy in Arab life.”…”In this atmosphere, cunning, treachery, murder, feuds and jealousies became a way of life” …Truth be told, not much has changed in official Zionist propaganda

      Uris sounds a lot like Pamela Geller.

      • W.Jones says:
        October 6, 2012 at 4:37 pm

        Arab men just “lay around” all day “listless”
        I talked with an educated Palestinian Christian immigrant today at Church. He said that they did not have an organized strong resistance like those who attacked them because they had just been separated from the Turkish empire by the British empire.

        The Turkish empire naturally controlled and ran the society, which would have included military and organizational forces, so when it was removed, people were left unorganized. Typically this could have been a basis for a nationalist anti-imperialist movement to take over and create an independent country, but in this case the British conquerors were immediately replaced by the new, well-funded and organized colonists coming from Europe.

        Further, the “Arabs” were in fact largely peasants and working class, so it is not a surprise they are portrayed as listless much like peasants often are, so long as the time for raising crops are not in season. That is, peasants’ productivity naturally comes and goes with the seasons. This is a stereotype about the “lower” classes in general and is ironic considering that the Zionist movement’s goal was to recreate a full-scale society from the base up, with the colonists’ image dedicated to becoming peasants themselves to a big extent.

        In conclusion, the image of Arabs as lazy is a stereotype about “lower classes” in general and their lack of self-organization was due to the fact they lived for centuries under the Ottoman empire, which ran their society.

        • gamal says:
          October 6, 2012 at 9:28 pm

          ah since beheading has become a little topical on another thread its worth pointing that Palestinian society was beheaded by both the British and their allies the Zionists, actually pretty much like Iraqi society and the on-going liberation of a progressively more headless Syrian society, its probably true that Arab intellectuals and notables are better off dead, or at least better when dead what is that frontier aphorism coined by Sherman “the only good indians i saw were….”

        • W.Jones says:
          October 6, 2012 at 11:50 pm

          The statement was supposedly made by Sheridan, but even that is wrong. Wikipedia says: “Sheridan denied he had made the statement. Earlier in 1869 Rep. James M. Cavanaugh said in Congress, “I have never seen in my life a good Indian … except when I have seen a dead Indian.” That remark may have been mistakenly attributed to Sheridan” (See article on Sherdian). Sheridan also had an Indian mistress.

  8. ColinWright says:
    October 6, 2012 at 2:04 am

    W.Jones says: “The headline here motivated me to see “Exodus.”…”

    I found Exodus to be an unbelievably bad film. I don’t say that merely because I hate Israel — Cast a Giant Shadow, for example, I recall as being pretty good. But Exodus? It was surreal how bad that was.

    • W.Jones says:
      October 6, 2012 at 4:57 pm

      Colin Wright,

      How about all the off-color over-the-top anti-Jewish comments by the British officer in the early parts of the film? And the weird part where the hero has him look into his eye based on the pretense that there is a piece of wood in it?

      (What is going on there?)

      I thought some of it was good though, and there is an adventure element to getting the boat out of the harbor with the refugees on it.

  9. Ismail says:
    October 6, 2012 at 10:48 am

    I appreciate the thoughtful comments (especially Rusty’s insightful comment about the significance of the “Exodus” theme), but I’m a little mystified by them as well.

    All I’m saying is that the film presents the I/P struggle as the latest instance of an eternal struggle over that piece of land. This strikes me as analytically useless, and has become a talking point of the apolitical -”what can you do, these people have been at it for centuries…”.

    The struggle for Palestine is the result of a specific late 19th century colonialist political movement, in concert with imperialist forces, to acquire land from an unwilling population. Getting into quasi-metaphysical notions of interchangeable armies having the same battle over and over adds not one photon of illumination to understanding the problem, nor to figuring out how to solve it.

    I understand that no text provides its own analysis, so of course my reading is only my reading.

    But I’m pretty sure it’s the right one.

  10. MHughes976 says:
    October 6, 2012 at 12:37 pm

    I think she’s saying ‘No exclusive claim is valid’ and that’s as anti-Zionist as you could get.

    • gamal says:
      October 6, 2012 at 9:49 pm

      except of course the claims of those who own Palestine, leaving aside “exclusive claims”, the claims of modern nation states are pretty exclusive arent they, when my current visa expires i shall to leave where i am at the moment inconvenient for me but its the same everywhere i have the right to live in the schengen region but would rather not so move is what i do no complaints ,

      as Ismail says this is the plague on all their houses evasion isnt it. Palestine like the Syria of which it is a part have had an essentially stable population for millenia, not that is particularly relevant to anything of interest, but not even educated Zionists contest this anymore, all that genetic mumbo jumbo was abandoned because it failed to show that Palestinians were all Arabian interlopers, again not sure what that would mean if true, Is there anywhere that has not been contested, telescoping 4000 years of history of anywhere would produce something like this wouldnt it?
      another rousing call to apathy.

      • MHughes976 says:
        October 7, 2012 at 9:08 am

        England has been contested very often, it’s true. I would think that a parallel animation making the same point, that there is no exclusive claim for those of Welsh, Anglo, Danish or Norman descent would be equally valid. If a claim made on the basis of one of these ancestries were being very violently asserted in the modern UK then it would be not just valid but an important reminder of an important point, certainly not a call to apathy.
        I agree that Palestine has not been contested in a way that puts it into a completely different league from England or Spain.

        • MHughes976 says:
          October 7, 2012 at 5:39 pm

          To add that the film is unfair in that it does not admit that the Palestinians of 48 were there in peace and had not arrived by any warlike means.
          Sometimes the Zionist propaganda tacitly admits this, saying that those people were rather casual immigrants with none of that splendid nationalist cohesion that we so admire. Sometimes it says something different.
          I still think that the film is anti-Zionist.

  11. Theo says:
    October 6, 2012 at 12:46 pm

    This video destroys the zionist claim of jews having the inherent rights to that bloody piece of real estate!
    Countless nations and peoples ruled it and the jews played only a minor role. However, the arabs/palestinians live there for thousands of years without interruptions, if we assume they are the biblical philisters already living there when the jews first invaded “their God promised land”.

  12. W.Jones says:
    October 6, 2012 at 4:52 pm

    The movie Exodus appears to be built on a parallel between the Exodus from Egyptian slavery to the Promised Land.

    In the Exodus story in the Bible, this means that Moses and his forces conquer and sometimes slaughter the pagan inhabitants of the Promised Land. In the Bible, this is portrayed as OK, because they are idolatrous. The image in the Bible isn’t that the local people don’t exist, it’s that they are pagans with the wrong beliefs.

    A big problem with this- and it’s an underlying one and I assume many movie viewers may not realize it- is that it ends up portraying Christian and Muslim communities as also pagans with the wrong beliefs. It basically imposes the Bible’s outlook on the pagans of 1500 BC onto the followers of Abrahamic religions in the 20th century AD.

    Plus, the sense in the movie becomes that the entirety of the Holy Land becomes part of this Old-Testament-style acquisition. “This land is ours” doesn’t seem to mean “the land designated by the UN” or something. Ultimately therefore it’s a message of conquering the whole territory of the Holy Land by one group of followers of Abraham and the conquest of other followers of Abraham.

    • MHughes976 says:
      October 6, 2012 at 5:24 pm

      Joshua rather than Moses. Moses did not enter the Promised Land because of his disobedience to God’s instructions at Meribah.
      I quite agree that ‘this land’ does not refer to anything as transitory and trivial as the borders drawn by the UN. The original claim to divine donation, justifying something which everyone ancient and modern knows is wrong in every normal circumstance, has never been forgotten.
      Idolatry may be a sin but the conquerors are not armed missionaries demanding, as would happen with the Spaniards in Mexico, that the old rites be replaced and sinful religion banished. They are taking for themselves because they, they themselves, are closer to God than anyone else and for the near future this situation cannot change. Other biblical passages suggest that many nations will be added to Yahweh in the last days but that will be then, this is now. The film version of Exodus does have some continuity, I think, with the Biblical original. It’s not a question of what beliefs the different peoples have, it’s a question of who they are.

      • ColinWright says:
        October 7, 2012 at 6:30 pm

        MHughes976: “… It’s not a question of what beliefs the different peoples have, it’s a question of who they are.”

        That would be a ringing affirmation of the Palestinians’ right to the land, and a dismissal of any Zionist claim to it.

  13. W.Jones says:
    October 20, 2012 at 2:24 pm

    I thought the song’s melody was good.

    On an interesting sidenote, I found what appears to be a sympathetic writing about the Exodus boat’s story that suggests the ship did not succeed in persuading people to allow disembarkment in Palestine as the movie (as well as conventional wisdom and frequent comments on the topic?) suggests:

    The incredible story of Exodus 1947
    written by: Tzvi Ben-tzur
    link to palyam.org
    What do you think?

    Personally, I think the idea of the people returning to their homeland is nice and romantic, I just don’t think the government should be dedicated to just one ethnicity or religion.

  14. W.Jones says:
    October 20, 2012 at 2:39 pm

    I also read Wikipedia’s article on “the Haj”, another book by Leon Uris. It could be seen as a counterpart to “Exodus,” because of the similar titles. “The Haj” sounded sympathetic at first, as it described the hardships faced by a leading Palestinian family that became refugees in the 1948 war. Its protagonist, Ibrahim, has a friendship with a kibbutz settler.

    So the story’s ending surprised me:

    Ibrahim gives up hope for a solution at the Zurich conference, revenges himself on Kabir, and returns to the refugee camp to face the dissolution of his life, traditions and values, the murder of his son Jamil, continued disappointment by Arab national leaders, his family’s loss of respect for him, his community’s passivity and inability to face reality. He brutally takes the life of his daughter, Nada, after she dishonors him by cursing him and telling him that she is no longer a virgin, the biggest possible disgrace to an Arab father. Ishmael becomes crazy after this, and “talks his father to death.” (Ibrahim dies of a heart attack after his son graphically informs him of the gang rape [of his mother, stepmother, and sister-in-law by Palestinian militant rivals] in Jaffa.) The novel ends with Ishmael going insane and becoming delusional.

    Wow.