Ever since her remarkable 2008 animated feature film Sita Sings The Blues, I’ve been a great admirer of animator, cartoonist, and free-culture activist Nina Paley’s creative and meta-creative work. The recent situation in Gaza makes Paley’s 2012 animated short film This Land Is Mine — “a brief history of the land called Israel / Palestine / Canaan / the Levant” — particularly timely.

Using the visual storytelling tropes of comics and videogames, genres characterized by expressive over-the-topness, Paley captures the subtleties and complexities of the interplay of religion, geopolitics, and the fatal human hunger for power underpinning the region’s long history of conflict.

On her blog, Paley offers a viewer’s guide to who’s killing whom, “because you can’t tell the players without a pogrom.” Her work, like Brain Pickings, is supported through donations, so consider making one on her site.