The Promise

[alexa]

Earlier this year Channel 4 broadcast a drama 'The Promise'. It was about a young girl who found her grandfather's diary of when he worked as a British soldier in Palestine before the establishment of the Jewish state. She goes there trying to find out what was going on and the drama interspersed between those days and more recent. It seems to be based on fact and is well worth watching. very moving.

Living in the UK I cannot get it on youtube so here is the page to where it can be viewed on Channel 4 - there is about 5 hours viewing so not all in one sitting!!

The Promise - 4oD - Channel 4

However you guys may not be able to get it there and like I said I cannot get it on youtube but it is there and here is the link to a page where it appears to be

YouTube - ‪The promise‬‏

Here you can listen to the director talking about the making of the drama - about 5 mins, may whet your appetite!

YouTube - ‪Director of hit drama 'The Promise' owns pro-Israeli critics‬‏

 

[docmauser1]

Here you can listen to the director talking about the making of the drama - about 5 mins, may whet your appetite! Director of hit drama 'The Promise' owns pro-Israeli critics

Some individuals never grow past punk/rebellion phase, indeed.

 

[alexa]

Here you can listen to the director talking about the making of the drama - about 5 mins, may whet your appetite! Director of hit drama 'The Promise' owns pro-Israeli critics

Some individuals never grow past punk/rebellion phase, indeed.

In reality it was finding this video which reminded me of the promise which was certainly one of the more impressive and moving drama's I have watched.

However, in this instance docmuster I think you have some point to criticise, though not necessarily in what you actually said.. I did not notice the jibe about pro Israelis in the youtube video title till after I posted it. I found it somewhere else as a review of the drama and clicked to get it from Youtube. The important thing about that clip to me was the expression that the film had no agenda but to present reality and was based on accounts of British soldiers who were there at the time. I nearly came back and removed it when I noticed the title jibe after I posted it but at the same time it presented an introduction to the drama.

Further this drama came out in Feb this year and it was then that I watched it. However with time, my memory was not so clear as if I had watched it yesterday.

I watched the beginning again late last night. That made me wonder whether I should have put a warning on the video as indeed Channel 4 does before you watch it. The first episode has some very graphic pictures of the situation the British found at Bergen-Belsen. It is very sobering and immediately sets the picture that this concerns human tragedy on the deepest levels.

The video is an account not yet heard

He (Kasminsky) says this is a British drama made primarily for and about Britons. His starting point was a letter sent by an army veteran who served in British-ruled Palestine in the 1940s. “He told me in his letter that there had been 100,000 soldiers based in Palestine in the period 1945-48 but that no one remembers them or talks about them.”

-snip-

Kosminsky was intrigued by the letter and formed a research team to look into the subject. That was eight years ago. The Promise, a major four part series commissioned by Channel 4, is the culmination of that project.

The story of a fictional British soldier called Len, and of his granddaughter Erin, who retraces her grandfather’s steps in modern-day Israel, makes for compelling but uncomfortable viewing. Len, who is in a regiment which liberated Bergen Belsen at the end of the Second World War, finds himself sympathetic to the plight of the Jews at the beginning of his tour of duty in Palestine. But faced with the hostility of the Jewish community, he gradually becomes alienated against them. This, says Kosminsky reflects his research.

“The almost universal view among the soldiers we interviewed was that they were intensely sympathetic to the Jews when they arrived. But in the three-and-a-bit years that followed, their attitudes changed. They were attacked by Jewish fighters, they were increasingly confined to quarters, their families were sent home, they were kidnapped and in one case, two sergeants were hanged. The soldiers began to see the Arabs as the underdogs and sympathy for them increased. The soldiers also felt aggrieved about what they felt was the ingratitude of Palestinian Jews, whom they felt they had helped in the Second World War.”

-snip-
Kosminsky also began to see parallels between the 1940s story and the present day. “We tend to think that the IDF invented the practice of blowing up the homes of suicide bombers. But I learned the British did exactly the same with members of the Jewish underground.”

His research also uncovered parallels of disillusionment between British soldiers and those of the IDF. He recalls. “I remember coming across an organisation called Breaking the Silence which is made up primarily of IDF soldiers who served in Hebron. They write, sometimes anonymously, about what happened to them there. I was interested in the transformatory effect on an individual of an experience like that. My idea was to invent a character, Paul, who has undergone such a change in his perception.”

Kosminsky insists that he is not coming at the conflict from any particular angle – he says he does not show partiality to either side but rather tries to represent the complexity of what remains one of the world’s most intractable conflicts. “One does a disservice to a complicated situation by presenting easy or pat solutions. So I have tried to show right and wrong on both sides, and by showing the characters not as cardboard goodies and baddies but as people who change their positions and contradict themselves.”

Peter Kosminsky’s “The Promise”, from Sunday 6th Feb at 9.00pm on Channel 4 | Jews for Justice for Palestinians

Review by Anthony Lerman

British television viewers are currently being treated to a 4-part dramatised lesson in the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. And so far, there has been virtually none of the knee-jerk complaints of anti-Israeli and even anti-Jewish bias usually levelled at such programmes by over-sensitive elements in the Jewish community. After the first two almost two-hour long episodes of Channel 4’s ‘The Promise’, which has two interlinked story lines—a British soldier’s experience in Mandate Palestine between 1945 and 1948 and his granddaughter’s exploration of that experience when she visits Israel in 2005—television critics have largely been impressed. And this is a series that tackles head-on the most controversial aspects of the conflict.

No one could say that resentment against Israel and Jews because of the actions of the Jewish terrorist groups in the last years of the Mandate is a live issue in Britain today. In Israel—although I haven’t tested this recently—I suspect the reverse isn’t quite true. There are many close ties between the UK and Israel, many things that Israelis admire about British politics, culture and society, but scratch the surface and lingering anger and bitterness at what older Israelis in particular regard as Britain’s perfidy in preventing Jewish immigration into Palestine and reneging on its commitment to facilitate the building of a ‘national home for the Jews’ can soon surface.

Where anger, or at least very mixed emotions, may still prevail is among the dwindling number of British soldiers who served in Palestine. And it was one such soldier who wrote to the acclaimed television film director Peter Kosminsky telling him that no one remembers or talks about the 100,000 military personnel who were based in Palestine between 1945 and 1948. Kosminsky, whose grandfather was Jewish, has made films about British soldiers in Bosnia, the Falklands War and the conflict in Northern Ireland, so it was no surprise that he was prompted to investigate further and come up with a treatment that would draw parallels between those post-war years and modern times.

-snip- That such a major and challenging series—in which the Israeli characters are drawn sympathetically and realistically, with not a hint of demonization—appears on one of the country’s mass audience television channels and is positively received throws an interesting light on what I believe are grossly exaggerated claims that London is the hub of international efforts to delegitimize Israel and that British Jews are subject to a constant barrage of media-driven anti-Zionist propaganda that borders on, or overlaps with, antisemitism. The film shows that major figures in the arts, often seen (but not necessarily correctly) as very left-wing, can present the Israel-Palestine conflict in a balanced way; and that when this is done audiences respond in a fair-minded fashion. The fact is that a substantial majority of people in the UK know very little about the conflict, past or present, and Kosminsky accurately reflects this in the central character, Erin.

Sadly, it’s the propagandists and shrill voices on all sides who grab most public attention, and it’s in their interests to oversimplify the arguments, even while disingenuously paying lip-service to the complexity of the issues. But in the last year or so, partly influenced by the significant emergence of much more even-handed attitudes among some pro-Israel leaders of the Jewish community, a more nuanced tone has perhaps crept into the public debate about Israel-Palestine. Kosminsky’s series is a contribution to that more reflective atmosphere and this is something Britain’s Jews should warmly welcome.

A Sensitive Television Drama on the Israel-Palestine Conflict « Antony Lerman

I hope some people will be able to watch what is a very moving drama showing things from a perspective not yet seen. I would hope that whatever your position, this drama would cause some pause for thought.

 

[docmauser1]

Here you can listen to the director talking about the making of the drama - about 5 mins, may whet your appetite! Director of hit drama 'The Promise' owns pro-Israeli critics

Some individuals never grow past punk/rebellion phase, indeed.

In reality it was finding this video which reminded me of the promise which was certainly one of the more impressive and moving drama's I have watched.

It was some cool diarrhetic drivel, indeed.