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The Promise (2011 TV serial)

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Genre
  
DramaPeriod drama

Directed by
  
Country of origin
  
United Kingdom

Final episode date
  
27 February 2011

8.4/10
IMDb

Written by
  
Composer(s)
  
First episode date
  
6 February 2011

Network
  
The Promise (2011 TV serial) wwwgstaticcomtvthumbtvbanners8513959p851395

Starring
  
Claire FoyChristian CookePerdita WeeksItay TiranKatharina SchüttlerHaaz Sleiman

Cast
  

The Promise is a British television serial in four episodes written and directed by Peter Kosminsky, with music by Debbie Wiseman. It tells the story of a young woman who goes to present-day Israel/Palestine determined to find out about her soldier grandfather's involvement in the final years of Palestine under the British mandate. It premiered on Channel 4 on 6 February 2011.

Contents

The Promise (2011 TV serial) Category Television relative autonomy media film amp politics

Cast

The Promise (2011 TV serial) The Promise 2011 TV serial Wikipedia

  • Claire Foy as Erin Matthews
  • Christian Cooke as Sergeant Leonard Matthews
  • Itay Tiran as Paul Meyer
  • Katharina Schüttler as Clara Rosenbaum
  • Yvonne Catterfeld as Ziphora
  • Haaz Sleiman as Omar Habash
  • Ali Suliman as Abu-Hassan Mohammed
  • Perdita Weeks as Eliza Meyer
  • Ben Miles as Max Meyer
  • Smadar Wolfman as Leah Meyer
  • Holly Aird as Chris Matthews
  • Hiam Abbass as Old Jawda
  • Lukas Gregorowicz as Captain Richard Rowntree
  • Luke Allen-Gale as Corporal Jackie Clough
  • Iain McKee as Sergeant Hugh Robbins
  • Paul Anderson as Sergeant Frank Nash
  • Max Deacon as Private Alec Hyman
  • Pip Torrens as Major John Arbuthnot
  • Subjects depicted in the serial

    The Promise (2011 TV serial) Channel 4 The Promise Cinema 2011 YouTube

  • British liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
  • King David Hotel bombing
  • Ein Hawd and Ein Hod villages
  • The Sergeants affair – the abduction of two British soldiers as hostages, and their killings as reprisal for the executions of Jewish guerrillas in Palestine
  • Israeli–Palestinian conflict in Hebron
  • Deir Yassin massacre
  • Battle of Haifa (1948)
  • 1948 Palestinian exodus
  • Gaza–Israel conflict
  • House demolition in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
  • Research

    The Promise (2011 TV serial) The Promise delivers but still divides Television amp radio

    The seed of the idea for The Promise came about in the wake of the 1999 drama Warriors, Kosminsky's sympathetic portrayal of British troops trying to carry through a peacekeeping mission in central Bosnia in 1992–93, their hands tied by an impossible mandate. A former soldier wrote to the programme's executive producer Jane Tranter at the BBC, complimenting her on the drama, before adding "You should do a film about the British soldiers who were in Palestine. No one remembers us."

    The Promise (2011 TV serial) Peter Kosminsky The Promise Episode 01 Full YouTube

    Tranter passed the letter to Kosminsky, who initially put it to one side. However, after completing The Project in 2002, Kosminsky presented the subject to the BBC as a possible theme for a future drama, and the BBC agreed to support research on it. The BBC's Sarah Barton, subsequently assisted by Sarah MacFarlane, began making contacts through regimental groups and the Palestine Veterans Association; then by telephone interviews and finally face-to-face, also attending the veterans' annual reunion at Eden Camp and slowly gaining their collective confidence; ultimately conducting detailed interviews with 82 veterans, some of them in their eighties, many of them speaking about things they had never felt able to tell even their wives and families. Many of the interviews were spread over several days, and some ran to hundreds of pages. At the same time, the oral accounts were compared with archive material from books and records of the Red Cross, the The National Archives and the Imperial War Museum, including the full run of weekly military intelligence situation digests. As the research continued, Kosminsky was particularly struck by the house demolitions carried out by the British, and began to wonder what other parallels that might exist with the present; so towards the end of this phase the research team also made contact with newly emerging groups of critical IDF veterans, Breaking the Silence and Combatants for Peace. According to Kosminsky, it took him 11 months simply to read all the research, including transcripts, archives, diaries, military reports and over 40 books that the researchers had prepared for him, while thinking how to distill it into a workable dramatic form.

    Characters and construction

    Rather than aiming to present the totality of events in 1946–48, Kosminsky says that his overriding aim for the drama was to present the experience of the 100,000 British soldiers who served in Palestine in the period, "to remind us all of what happened". After the exit from Palestine nobody had wanted to remember, the veterans had been "shunned"; they had "returned home to find the nation that wanted nothing to do with them", with no memorial, and been denied even "the right to march to the Cenotaph in formation". At the same time most of them had found it incredibly hard to talk about their experiences. "I was determined that their story be told." This was always his aim for the drama, to "honour the original letter sent to the BBC", so this was always going to be the path of Len's journey. Overwhelmingly, the veterans told a similar story: they had started out "incredibly pro-Jewish"; but, almost to a man, they had shifted their allegiance and by the end of their stay "were feeling a great deal of sympathy for the Arabs". "A big change came in the final months, as they saw what would happen to the Palestinians, and realised both sides were to be abandoned to a war." "It was always going to be necessary for us to faithfully reflect this in our drama," "I either had to reflect it or abandon the project." The series was led by what had come out of the interviews, what the soldiers had said and felt, and what they had actually experienced, rather than things such as British higher policy calculations, or the activities of the Haganah, with which the rank-and-file veterans had had little contact. Of all the subsequent reactions to the series, according to Kosminsky what had meant the most to him was a letter from a veteran, now 85 years old: "You did what you said you would. Thank you so much."

    The character of Erin was influenced by his two teenage daughters, one of whom has epilepsy. Kosminsky felt the trait wasn't often shown on screen unless it was a major plot point, so he liked the idea of showing "an eighteen-year-old girl who is trying to live a normal life, despite the fact she occasionally had epileptic fits; and how other people cope with that as well". For personal reasons, Kosminsky had long wanted to explore the idea of a young person gradually coming to appreciate "the young man inside the shell of an older, sick man", to the extent that he sees the drama as an unconventional love story, capped when Paul tells Erin that the young Len of the diary no longer exists. Erin's passionate response "He does to me, he does to me!" was for Kosminsky perhaps the most important line in the whole film. The casual relationship Erin has with Eliza, "the way they talk, the way they react, their limited attention span" was very much drawn from his experience of his daughters and their friends; and he felt that the combination of naivety and flinty assertiveness were not atypical of an "eighteen-year-old kid from London", particularly given an emotionally rather unsympathetic upbringing. Dramatically, it was also important to make the character contrast with the "endlessly heroic and gentlemanly" Len. So it was intentional that initially she should be harder to like (though perhaps not the reaction from Twitter that she was impossible to like). However, he hoped that the audience would be won over as they came to better know the character, and that initially undercutting her in this way and having the audience make this journey would make more powerful what he saw as her bravery and single-mindedness in the later episodes.

    Erin's emotional journey intentionally parallels the 1940s arc, because at the heart of it is her increasing engagement with Len. "She becomes obsessed with him... she feels what he's feeling... so, by the time we get to Gaza, she patterns herself on what she thinks he would have done." Through the modern story, Kosminsky says that he wants to show how the past can have consequences for the present, and that having left "chaos, political confusion, bloodshed and war", Britain has a responsibility for what happens today. "It is our problem, at least in part, and we should take some responsibility for it". Coupled with this he writes that what has struck him most is a question: "How did we get from there to here?" In 1945 the Jewish plight had the sympathy of most of the world, but "just 60 years later, Israel is isolated, loathed and feared in equal measure by its neighbours, finding little sympathy outside America for its uncompromising view of how to defend its borders and secure its future. How did Israel squander the compassion of the world within a lifetime?" This is what The Promise sets out to explore. But he is not offering any easy answers: rather he seeks to make more understandable and human the complexity of the situation. "It does not help anyone by claiming that good and justice are on one side only. If it were that simple, we would have already found a solution. There are rights and truths on each side, that compete with each other. You can not have everything on one side or the other, everything is meshed together" ... "There are no good guys and bad guys in this sad situation and we have tried very hard to show pluses and minuses on both sides." "I would be very sad if someone were to consider the series as partisan." But rather than present an impossible perfect balance, what he hoped to create in the drama was more a kind of unstable equilibrium, so that audiences would find their sympathies shifting, repeatedly, from one side to the other.

    Pre-production, further research, and finance

    As of 2006 the project had the working title Palestine and was slated to be made for the BBC through Carnival Films, best known as makers of the Poirot series for ITV. However, Kosminsky had grown increasingly estranged from the BBC, later saying that film-makers no longer saw "that flash of mischief" when pitching ideas. "I don't think we can say the BBC bottled it... [However] it seems to have lost its nerve for making challenging drama... drama that gets it into political and legal hot water." The BBC agreed to sell its interest and let the project go into turnaround — for a generously low rate according to Kosminsky — and in 2007 Kosminsky entered into an exclusive deal with Daybreak Pictures, run by Channel 4's former head of film David Aukin, with whom he had previously made The Government Inspector (2005) and Britz (2007).

    At this stage the project existed as a detailed treatment which ran to 180 pages, with many scenes described in considerable detail. Several researchers continued to conduct interviews, looking for telling details to further enrich particular aspects of the story. Kosminsky also flew to Israel with David Aukin, where they were able to visit the real-life places that would be featured in the story, including the normally closed-off Deir Yassin, accompanied each day by a different modern Israeli historian specialising in the period, organised by their Israeli pre-production partners, an Israeli documentary film company. Benny Morris let Kosminsky read a pre-publication proof copy of his book 1948; and from a recent PhD student of Motti Golani at Haifa University Kosminsky heard about the city hospitality clubs, still sixty years on a stigmatised subject, which shaped the background for Clara in the story. Scripts followed quickly, and by mid-2008 Channel 4 publicly announced its backing for the project.

    Daybreak had initially costed the drama at £8 million, which with some trimming of a few scenes they had been able to pare back to £7 million. Channel 4 committed £4 million to the budget, roughly in line with the channel's hourly rate for prestige drama. Other sources of funding were more difficult. In France, a deal giving Canal + first-run subscription broadcast rights, with free-to-air rights on ARTE a year later, was negotiated by Daybreak's long-standing existing production contact Georges Campana, bringing in a further £1 million. SBS (a frequent co-producer with ARTE) secured Australian rights, and some top-up funding was obtained from the E.U. media fund. However pre-sale negotiations for America and Germany, while cordial, proved slow, and finally ran into the sand. Eventually, having put back filming from an original autumn 2009 intended start, and with everything else in place and ready to go, Kosminsky went back to Channel 4 and laid it on the line – without another £1 million the series simply wasn't going to happen. Exceptionally, Channel 4 gave the extra funding the green light, and filming finally started in Israel in early 2010 under the revised title Homeland, beginning with the period scenes set at Stella Maris. Channel 4 presented its support as part of a £20 million investment in drama, also including This is England '86 and Any Human Heart, made possible by cancellation of the £50 million per series it was previously spending on Big Brother.

    Filming

    The serial was filmed entirely in Israel, with a predominantly Israeli crew and through Israeli production company Lama Films; something very unusual for a UK television drama production. According to Kosminsky the team also looked at Morocco, Cyprus, Southern Spain and Tunisia, and could have recreated the 1940s sequences there; but nowhere else would have replicated the "buildings, range of cultures or topography" of modern-day Israel. The early scene of the flat in Leeds was created in an Israeli studio. Everything else was shot on location in and around Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Caesarea, Acre, Givat Brenner, Ein Hod, Peqi'in, Ramla and Beit Gemal in a 68-day schedule involving 180 different locations. Ben Gurion Airport stood in for Heathrow, and the bombed rubble of the King David Hotel was filmed against a blue screen in a car park in Petach Tikva. Part of the Old City in Jerusalem stood in for Nablus in the West Bank, the Hebron-set scenes were filmed in Acre, while Gaza was represented by Jisr al-Zarqa, "reputed to be the poorest town in Israel" according to Kosminsky. The paratroopers' base at Stella Maris had been a challenge to find, but eventually the monastery at Beit Gemal was used and proved very accommodating. Period military vehicles were also a challenge to source without shipping them in at prohibitive expense; the tracked armoured vehicle used in the series was an amalgam of parts from five different vehicles found in a junkyard, cobbled together into one that worked.

    Filming used conventional Super 16mm film, which was then processed and edited in England. The cinematographer, David Higgs, had been keen to try the new Red One high resolution digital camera. However, the team were concerned by potentially limited contrast ratio using digital – a serious consideration in the strong Mediterranean light; and that its potential bulkiness might inhibit Kosminsky's trademark extensive use of hand-held camera to follow the action. It was also felt that relying on comparatively simple well-known technology would be a good idea when operating so far from home. Ironically, however, the reliance on film led to a number of scenes having to be re-mounted after film fogging went undetected for a whole week when it was impossible to get daily film rushes back to London because of the air travel disruption caused by the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. Extensive use was also made of CGI and digital post-production, which was by no means limited to the café explosion, the destruction at the King David Hotel, and the refugee ship of would-be immigrants. A particular challenge was how to realise the events at Bergen-Belsen. The film-makers considered and rejected a number of options, including live-action and CGI, before reluctantly deciding to fall back on archive black-and-white library footage provided by the Imperial War Museum in London, only to come to the view that the resulting sequence had more artistic and moral power than anything they might ever have been able to create in its stead.

    United Kingdom

    Overnight ratings for The Promise were 1.8 million for the first episode, followed by 1.2 million, 1.3 million, and 1.2 million viewers for the three remaining episodes. Consolidated ratings, which include time-shifted and online viewing, generally added approximately 0.5 million to these overnight figures.

    The first episode was reviewed widely and generally received a very positive initial notice, although Andrew Anthony in The Observer was more critical and A.A. Gill, writing in the The Sunday Times, was unimpressed. The Daily Express called it "...a little burning bush of genius in the desert of well-intentioned TV dramas...", The Daily Telegraph said the programme would richly deserve any Baftas that came its way, and Caitlin Moran in The Times called it "almost certainly the best drama of the year". By the second episode Andrew Billen, writing in The Times, was concerned that both Len and Erin were meeting from the Arabs a "little too much kindness for the comfort of all of us hoping that Kosminsky will parcel out recriminations in exactly equal proportions"; but nonetheless applauded the "immersive and emotional" quality of the series.

    The serial as a whole was praised by Christina Patterson in The Independent who said it was "...beautifully shot and extremely well written. It is also extremely balanced..."; and Rachel Cooke in the New Statesman and The Observer, where she said it was "...the best thing you are likely to see on TV this year, if not this decade." There was also praise from Stephen Kelly in Tribune, Harriet Sherwood and Ian Black, Jerusalem correspondent and Middle East editor of The Guardian respectively, and David Chater, previewing the serial for The Times, who called it courageous and applauded its lack of didacticism.

    London free newspaper Metro felt that the third episode dragged, having warmly received the first two parts; but then praised the series as a whole. Previewing the final episode, The Times said it was "ambitious" and "packs a considerable punch"; Time Out chose the programme as its pick of the day, and gave it a four-star recommendation, calling it "brave filmmaking and a brave, entirely successful commission". Andrew Anthony in The Observer acknowledged some flaws, but found it still "an exceptional drama".

    A press attaché at the Israeli embassy in London, however, condemned the drama to The Jewish Chronicle as the worst example of anti-Israel propaganda he had ever seen on television, saying it "created a new category of hostility towards Israel". The Zionist Federation and the Board of Deputies of British Jews both also lodged letters of complaint. The Jewish Chronicle itself took the view that rather than "attempt to tell both sides of what is a complex and contentious story", the series had turned out to be "a depressing study in how to select historical facts to convey a politically loaded message". Writing in The Independent, novelist Howard Jacobson said that in The Promise "Just about every Palestinian was sympathetic to look at, just about every Jew was not. While most Palestinians might fairly be depicted as living in poor circumstances, most Israeli Jews might not be fairly depicted as living in great wealth... Though I, too, have found Palestinians to be people of immense charm, I could only laugh in derision at The Promise every time another shot of soft-eyed Palestinians followed another shot of hard-faced Jews." In an interview with Jacobson during Jewish Book Week 2011, Jonathan Freedland, having seen the first episode of The Promise, said Kosminsky used antisemitic tropes, misrepresenting Israel and Zionism as being a consequence of the Holocaust, whose imagery he had abused. Historian, Professor David Cesarani, accused Kosminsky of "deceit...massive historical distortion": omitting the Balfour Declaration's promise of a Jewish national home; downplaying selfish British geo-strategy; and exculpating the British, "chief architects of the Palestine tragedy...making responsible...only the Jews"; turning a tricorn conflict of British, Arabs and Jews "into a one-sided rant." On the other hand, Liel Leibovitz, writing for American online Jewish magazine Tablet, took the view that, "contrary to these howls of discontent, the show is a rare and riveting example of telling Israel’s story on screen with accuracy, sensitivity, and courage".

    The broadcasting regulator Ofcom received 44 complaints about the series, but Ofcom concluded in a 10-page report that the series did not breach its code of conduct. Viewers complained that the drama, about British Mandate Palestine and its legacy, was antisemitic, used upsetting footage of concentration camps, incited racial hatred, was biased against Israel and presented historical inaccuracies. But, Ofcom said: "Just because some individual Jewish and Israeli characters were portrayed in a negative light does not mean the programme was, or was intended to be, antisemitic... Just as there were Jewish/Israeli characters that could be seen in a negative light, so there were British and Palestinian characters that could also be seen in a negative light." Delivering his first keynote speech to the Royal Television Society in London on 23 May 2011, David Abraham, the Chief Executive of Channel 4, said: "At a time when other broadcasters are perhaps more conservative, it's more important than ever for Channel 4 to challenge the status quo, stimulate debate, take risks and be brave... I can think of no better example of how we continue to do that than in Peter Kosminsky's recent examination of the Israel/Palestine question in The Promise."

    The Promise was nominated for both the British Academy Television Awards 2011 and the Royal Television Society Programme Awards 2011 in the category of best drama serial, but was beaten by two other productions broadcast on Channel 4, the TV adaptation of William Boyd's Any Human Heart and the drama serial Top Boy respectively. Interviewed in The Jewish Chronicle, Any Human Heart's director, Michael Samuels, said about The Promise, "I respect it for having a point of view. You have to have that, otherwise you are not writing".

    The Promise also received a nomination, at the Banff World Television Festival, for Best Mini-Series of 2010/2011. On 10 May 2011, at the One World Media Awards in London, The Promise won Best Drama of 2010/11.

    France

    The subscription channel Canal+ aired the drama under the title The Promise: Le Serment over four weeks starting on 21 March 2011, in a prime-time Monday evening slot that it tends to use for more serious or historical drama series. Libération called it "admirable", praising the "excellent director" for telling a "tragedy in two voices", while "pointing the finger at neither one side nor the other". Les Echos called it "exceptional, stunningly intelligent" and said the considered dialogue and tense, serious acting fully measured up to the ambition of the film. TV magazine Télérama called it "remarkable", confronting its subject "head on". Le Figaro said it was "magnificently filmed and masterfully acted... perfectly balanced... great television", and gave it a maximum rating of four stars out of four. The Nouvel Obs and Le Journal du Dimanche both identified the series as reflecting the viewpoint of the "British pro-Palestinian left", but the latter praised it as "nevertheless a historical fiction useful for understanding an intractable conflict", while the former commended its "epic spirit, rare on television". Le Monde gave the series an enthusiastic preview in its TéléVisions supplement along with a lengthy interview with the director. Le Point predicted Kosminsky would receive a "shower of awards...[a]nd also gibes". However, La Croix's reviewer was more hostile, considering that although there was "no doubt that the film ought to be seen", it "cannot be mistaken for a history lesson but a great partisan fiction", marred by bias and an "embarrassing" representation of Jews. L'Express considered it beautiful but too long.

    A letter of protest to the channel was written by the President of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF), arguing that "the viewer sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however complex, only as a consequence of violence and cruelty of the Jews, who are represented as so extreme that if any empathy towards them is excluded." CRIF did not ask for the broadcast to be pulled, but rather to be balanced with a programme taking a different position, and for the fictional nature of the series to be made clear. The Jewish Chronicle (JC) reported that CRIF president Richard Prasquier had met the president of Canal+, Bertrand Meheut. Prasquier reportedly told him that such a series "could only fan the flames of antisemitic violence" and Meheut reportedly promised that viewers would be provided with balanced information about the issue; The JC reported that Canal+ had agreed to broadcast a caption reading "The Promise is fiction" before each episode. The Confederation of French Jews and Friends of Israel (CJFAI) issued a call (publicised by CRIF) for a demonstration against the programme, which it described as "a vitriolic saga of murderous disinformation". The demonstration in front of the Canal+ offices on the night of the first showing was reported to have attracted a few hundred people, with CRIF represented by its vice-president. The Israeli embassy in Paris made no comment.

    Arte announced it would show the series over two Friday evenings, on 20 and 27 April 2012.

    Australia

    The serial was shown by Australian broadcaster SBS in a Sunday evening slot from 27 November to 18 December 2011. Critical reaction was positive, with The Australian selecting part one as its pick of the week, calling the character development and performances "compelling", and saying that the series "offers insight into the history of one of the world's most conflicted places", while press agency AAP wrote that "Foy shines amid a powerful storyline", wising up to "a few harsh truths". The Sydney Morning Herald and other Fairfax group newspapers trailed the serial as "ambitious... both bracingly original and wonderfully gripping", offering a "profound veracity". The SMH's Doug Anderson subsequently called the serial "the best drama series on television at present... This is powerful stuff, distilling enormous difficulties to a deeply personal level", and the newspaper selected the series for its review of the best and worst television of the year, writing that it was "gripping... it dazzled via a raw and complex portrait of conflict in the Middle East... Kosminsky's storytelling was mesmerising."

    A number of organizations, including the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council and the Friends of Israel Western Australia, urged viewers to complain about the series, reiterating negative comments that had been made about the serial in the UK. There was also a concerted campaign by Palestinian solidarity groups to drum up support for the series. The editor of the Australians for Palestine website wrote, “Although people had written to SBS commending it for showing “The Promise”, Mr Ebeid [the Managing Director of SBS] received only one supportive letter addressed to him personally from Anisa Hamood in Adelaide. Many more are needed in defence of the series for the hearing.” One senator, Glenn Sterle of Western Australia, also joined criticism about the series, calling it "derogatory" and "anti-Semitic". In January 2012 the most senior body of Jewry in Australia, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) filed its own 31-page complaint with the SBS television network, claiming that the series "unrelentingly portrays the entire Jewish presence throughout the country, including modern-day Israel, as an act of usurpation by Jews who, without exception, are aliens, predators and thieves and who enforce their usurpation by brutal, racist policies akin to those inflicted by the Nazis upon the Jewish people", and compared the series to the infamous Nazi film Jud Süss. The ECAJ rejected in its complaint the relevance or validity of the British Ofcom inquiry. The ECAJ also called for a halt to sales of the DVD of the series while the complaint is investigated. The ECAJ position was given considerable coverage in the Australian Jewish News which headlined the complaint as "TV series The Promise akin to Nazi propaganda". In contrast, Australians for Palestine has been strongly supportive of the series. On 17 January the language of the ECAJ complaint reached the front page of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.

    Another opinion expressed by the Australian Jewish Democratic Society stated "We agree with the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) that the Jewish characters portrayed are generally unsympathetic in comparison with the Arab characters. But we fundamentally disagree that this bias amounts to anti-Semitism... in our view The Promise is a worthwhile contribution to the debates about the intractable conflict". Other debate over the series has been carried out, for example, on the online site associated with Australian Broadcasting Corporation's debate programme, The Drum. The Australian Jewish Democratic Society also made available the full text of the OfCom decision as a contribution to open public debate. Prior to this release only parts had been available in the ECAJ submission or in the media because Ofcom had not published it.

    The SBS Complaints Committee met on 17 January, and took the view that there were no grounds to find the programme had breached SBS's code. In particular, it found "that the characterisations in The Promise did not cross the threshold into racism, and in particular that it did not promote, endorse, or reinforce inaccurate, demeaning or discriminatory stereotypes". Complainants were advised that they could take their concerns to the Australian Communications and Media Authority for external review. In response to the SBS decision, the ECAJ said that it stood by its position, but would not be appealing SBS's conclusion.

    A further complaint was sent to SBS on 1 February 2012 by Stepan Kerkyasharian, Chairperson of the New South Wales government's Community Relations Commission, branding The Promise as "the portrayal of an entire nation in a negative light", noting "concern that the series negatively portrays the WHOLE of the Jewish People. Such a portrayal cannot be justified in ANY context. There is a distinct separation between condemning an action by a government on the one hand and condemning the whole of the people of a nation collectively, through stereotyping, on the other hand." Kerkyasharian urged SBS "to re-consider the representations from the Jewish Community with due regard to the potential destructive consequences of racial stereotyping". In contrast, Hal Wootten, Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales and former president of the Indigenous Law Centre there, considered the ECAJ's position to be misguided: "There is a striking irony in a Jewish organisation’s striving to show that every Jewish character is a demon and every Arab character a saint. One by one, the ECAJ’s submission proceeds to do a hatchet job on every Jewish character of any importance, rejecting the humanity with which Kosminsky endows each of them, and substituting an anti-Semitic stereotype of its own manufacture... The ECAJ reaches the opposite conclusion only by itself imputing unfavourable attributes to the Jewish characters, judging them by harsh and unrealistic standards, interpreting their conduct in the worst possible way, and making quite absurd comparisons."

    Responding to Professor Wootten, the ECAJ’s Executive Director, Peter Wertheim, stated "Professor Wootten denies that The Promise makes and invites judgements, but this contention is belied by the strident comments made by other defenders of the series in posted comments on the SBS and other websites, and is as low on the scale of credibility as the stream of non-sequiturs that have been put forward in its defence, including posts asserting that The Promise could not possibly be antisemitic because Kosminsky is Jewish, or because it was filmed in Israel and included Jewish actors, or because it was nominated for a BAFTA award."

    On 14 February 2012, the Managing Director of SBS, Michael Ebeid, appeared before an Estimates Committee of the Australian Senate and was closely questioned about the relevant commercial arrangements and decision-making processes leading to the screening of the series by SBS. Ebeid accepted that overall the series conveyed a negative view of Israel and said he would not claim that the drama tried to be balanced; but, he said, he did not think that drama is meant to be balanced; and he rejected claims of negative stereotyping. It had not been his decision to buy the series, but asked whether with hindsight he would have made the same decision, he answered that he probably would, yes. Following the hearing, committee members Senator Scott Ryan and Senator Helen Kroger, both of Victoria, both issued press releases sharply critical of the series, and of SBS's decision to run it. Senator Kroger stated that "SBS appears to have put a business decision ahead of independent assessments which determined that it was offensive to the Jewish community." Kroger's comments were taken up by The Australian newspaper, along with an op-ed written by two members of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, and she expanded further on her views in an online piece for News Ltd website The Punch. Senator Ryan rejected Mr Ebeid’s claim that because The Promise was fiction, it was subject to different considerations. "Some of the biggest slanders in history have been works of fiction," Senator Ryan said. "Depictions in the series include Jewish children stoning Arab children, blood-thirsty soldiers, conniving double-agents and members of an extremely wealthy, cosmopolitan family. Like it or not, these three depictions are antisemitic stereotypes that are at the same time old, but also reappearing today." On the other hand, the committee's chairman, Senator Doug Cameron of New South Wales, said he had "enjoyed" the programme, and quipped in closing the session that he hoped the night had helped The Promise's DVD sales.

    Other countries

    As of January 2012 the serial has also been sold to SVT Sweden, YLE Finland, DR Denmark, RUV Iceland, RTV Slovenia, Globosat Brazil, and TVO Canada. DR Denmark broadcast the series in an early evening slot on the DR2 channel over the Easter weekend 2012, under the translated title Løftet som bandt ("The Promise that bound"). In Germany it was shown on ARTE Channel on 20 April (Part 1 and 2) and 27 April (Part 3 and 4). In Sweden it will be shown on channel SVT1 on Wednesday nights at 10pm from 2 May. In Canada, TV Ontario had scheduled the programme for Sunday evenings, from 15 April to 6 May; but the channel has since decided to present a geology series with Iain Stewart in this slot, with The Promise held over to a later date.

    The series was screened in April 2012 by the Tel Aviv Cinematheque and the Jerusalem Cinematheque in Israel, and in May 2012 by the Haifa Cinematheque, with five showings in the month for each episode in Tel Aviv, two in Jerusalem, and one in Haifa. In Tel Aviv the first screening of Part One was on 9 April, culminating with a final screening of all four parts on 26 April. In Jerusalem the series was scheduled with the four parts shown over two days, on 14/15 and 29/30 April. In Haifa the episodes were screened on successive Thursdays, from 10 May to 21 May.

    In the United States a screening of the series was presented at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, New York in November and December 2011, with the first part shown as part of the "Other Israel" film festival, and the remainder of the series shown in weekly episodes over the following three weeks.

    In May 2012 it was announced that the series would be a featured offering on the internet television service Hulu from 11 August, and it has been available on demand from Hulu.

    References

    The Promise (2011 TV serial) Wikipedia