mjohnson-59927 My wife recently downloaded this as a box set and watching it again reconfirms my belief that this is the most important television drama of the decade.Inevitably given its subject, there are bound to be those who do not agree with or accept its premise, the plot, the direction, the acting etc etc.They are simply wrong and angry that it does not confirm their own preconceptions rather than judging it on its merits.It is an interpretation of events from one point of view and there could and should be others. It is nonetheless gut wrenchingly effective, emotionally compelling, well scripted, brilliantly acted and directed.So much TV drama in recent years is anodyne, politically neutered, action packed hokum or crime led escapism. This is the antidote, challenging and compelling.The Promise is a remarkable and memorable work of art that happens to be television drama. Nothing is ever perfect and there is a clear directorial stance (or bias, if you prefer) but it has huge ambition and succeeds triumphantly on its own terms while carrying a mighty punch.Find it, watch it and decide for yourself.

siholdam Never mind the cinematic problem with switching between time periods, instead focus on the problem of offering up an interpretation of history this is stewed in contemporary sensibilities. No wonder hate crimes against Jewish people have increased - this biased portrayal helps to explain why. It was laboured and obvious - though the amazing coincidences made it more Alice in Wonderland than Alice attempting to illustrate how the Israeli's just following orders... the one sided attempt to portray Jews as little better than Nazi's was crude and inaccurate. The other reviews on here suggesting it was "historically accurate" need to take a closer look at history, or try dropping the one sided interpretation. It's a shame the director did not do the same before making this film... oh hang on, it wouldn't have been made if it didn't portray Jews as the victims turned villains. I am no defender of the Zionist position on the occupied territories - it is an illegal occupation - but this series lacked balances and that makes it part of the myth making that fuels hate.

Cmbh I very much enjoyed parts of the Promise, but thought a great deal of it was basically crap.The immediate post war aftermath in Palestine is a very good setting for a film/TV series and is a little known period in history for the general public. I thought the story set there was very compelling, with a good protagonist and remained balanced until the final episode.In contrast the framing device of the girl reading her grandfather's diary was poorly constructed and meant we had to spend far too much time in the company of a girl whose only expression was a sullen pout. At times this became absolutely ludicrous, like her reason for wanting to visit Hebron 'to see how her grandfather's story turned out'. It's not that big a diary, unless you are the world's slowest reader you could read it cover to cover in a few hours. It was also a far less balanced story, with characters presenting as fact only one side of deeply controversial issues. Take the security barrier, condemned as useless for security reasons, and yet suicide bombings plummeted after its construction.Talking about bias, we then come to the final episode, which presented the start of the arab-israeli war of 1948 as purely of poor helpless Arabs being slaughtered by Israelis. Both sides committed atrocities against civilians in the build up to the war and the war itself saw 2,400 Jewish civilians lose their lives. A far more interesting story might how a militia of only 30,000 Jews (at the start of the war) held back the armies of the Arab world.In conclusion a good historical drama let down by its bias and framing device.

Guy I had reservations about THE PROMISE. After all, this is a four-part, eight-hour long miniseries, taking part in two time periods about the Israel-Palestine conflict. This tricky issue tends to be reduced to propaganda by partisans from both sides. Unfortunately Peter Kosminsky is such a partisan and he delivers a rant in the form of melodrama, not helped by tired direction, a thin script and poor history.The story is partly set in 2005 and partly in the period 1945-8. In 2005 a young British student named Erin finds her grandfather's diary. Through the diary we follow Len, her grandfather, as he serves with the British Army in Palestine from 1945 to 1948. This becomes significant as Erin travels to Israel with a friend and finds herself trying to fulfil a promise her grandfather made all those years ago.Kosminsky's pitch is essentially ethnic Jewish self-criticism in which he castigates the Israelis for the bloody way in which they founded and have maintained their state. Unfortunately this means that he isn't really very interested in either the Palestinians or the British. The Palestinians appear only as victims and exercise no agency of their own. Erin/Len largely act as eyes for the viewer. By far the most interesting parts concern the Israeli family of Erin's friend and their internal dynamics (grandfather is an ex-Irgun, the parents are good liberal Israelis, the son is a former soldier working for peace, the daughter has just been conscripted for the IDF). Erin (apparently based on Kosminsky's daughters - God help them) is an ignorant slag who manages to sleep with most of the cast for no discernible reason, who is often bafflingly obtuse (demanding driving lessons from a Palestinian when her epilepsy means she isn't allowed to drive) and spends most of her time in a sullen pout. She's also a bit of an idiot - when the Israeli's try to bulldoze a Palestinian house she chains herself and a young child to a pillar inside. Endangering kids much? The whole thing is then rendered instantly facile when her Israeli chum promptly gets out a pair of wire- cutters and breaks the chain before taking her outside. Much of her time is spent prompting people to provide long, boring exposition in case the audience are idiots. Incidentally her epilepsy almost never features in the story and serves no purpose.Len meanwhile is a such a mass of contradictions as to not exist as a proper character. Supposedly a veteran of Arnhem, a tough Para and a working class lad from Leeds, he is played with a doe eyed passivity, broken only by moments of shrill anger and unconvincing heroics (all the combat scenes are silly and exist only to liven up the trailers). His loyalties are supposed to be tested but really he just rolls with the flow, transferring his loyalties to whichever side (Arab or Jew) has received the most victim points that episode. Rather than bother to build a character Kosminsky just manufactures scenes every so often where Brits are beastly to Arabs/Jews so that Len can swan in and save them so that we know he's a hero. Probably his finest moment is when finds his Jewish girlfriend tarred and feathered and promptly decides that what a traumatised woman needs is...yet another painfully ugly sex scene.The script makes very little pretence to be even handed, picking (rightly)on every Israeli fault whilst ignoring Arab ones. Both Len and Erin go on a learning journey from pro-Israeli/Jewish to anti- Israeli/Jewish (as opposed to pro-Palestinian/Arab). In Erin's timeline this works OK as she meets the Jewish religious settlers (not very nice people), sees the humiliating checkpoint system, the chronic discrimination against Palestinians and discovers the results of the ethnic cleansing from 1948. However this method works very badly for Len's story. So you get the arrival of the Holocaust survivors, the King David Hotel bombing, the Affair of the Sergeants and the ethnic cleansing of Arab villages in 1948. But there is little else but these big events and as a result the whole narrative is very jumpy, with no sense of the passage of time.A lot of the problems are down to the ham-handedness of the direction and deeply mediocre work by the DP. There is no feel for the period 1945-8 and the impression is often of children playing dress-up. Many scenes are risibly bad with pride of place going to a terrible exploding CGI door that flies straight at the viewer like one of those gimmick shots from a 3D movie. There is also precious little tension, mood- building, immediacy or physicality. Moments that ought to be shocking or scary or blood-pumping are instead flat. There is also a tendency to manufacture fake drama, as when Len leaves his unit (who are under attack) to rescue the son of his Arab friend, escorts him several miles and then abandons him 100 feet from safety whereupon the kid is promptly shot by a sniper. It makes no sense and is utterly contrived. Incidentally, Len then returns to his unit, with several hours having passed, to discover that...literally nothing has changed.There are numerous historical oddities. For instance, Len is a Sergeant but appears to have no officer and is casually let into high-ranking meetings. For instance, the impression is given that Israel started the 1948 war and that it was a purely Israeli-Palestinian fight. For instance, Kosminsky's belief that the use of collective punishment by the Brits against Jews and by Israelis against Palestinians is unique (it's as old as time).I don't have a side in the Israel-Palestine dispute and frankly don't care. My interest was largely in the British.This is poor history, poor writing and poor drama.