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Simply Perfect

Lack of good storyline.

Fantastic!

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

I have lived for a longish time in the Israel, but I am not Jewish or arab. Even though the reason I was in the area was actually that I'm so interested in history.There are so many points in this mini-series that I ponder about. The biggest one before watching the series was if this was yet another pro- zionist or pro-jihadist series.Well. I got my answer. The other questions I came up while and after watching it.1. Why do they comment the wall on west bank as "disgusting" but fail to mention how much bombings & suicide attacks against Israel have decreased after it was built?2. I do agree that Irgun and Jewish attacks against British government were acts of terrorism, but still the series brings the happenings out of proportions: "Oh my, the Irgun did a few bombings, so they're more evil than jihad terrorists that have made hundreds of such attacks, and not just against military but in fact mostly civilian targets". If you're military, you might be a target. But if you're civilian, any civilized soldier will leave you alone. 3. Lots of small things. Blackpainting of Jewish civilians (the counter- protest part), IDF soldiers who seem like Nazis (contrary to my own personal experiences), taking comments about forcing arabs to move contrary to the reality, arabs were told and encouraged to stay in their homes, etc.I have been personally to / close the locations where the modern day events take place. This did bring me back a lot of memories. I've seen conflicts similar to what the series described, but both sides were throwing rocks, palestines threw even bottles and molotov coctails until IDF came in and the ran away. It ain't as black & white as the series shows. It tries to show Jewish and IDF as evil Nazis. Unfortunately.The series had its potential, lost by a very one-sided view.

'After all, it's only fiction..' is what the author/film maker reminds us, when unable to answer some important questions about this sentimental TV series..If you're looking to be manipulated (the film starts relatively promisingly), and totally but subtly brain-washed by this pretentious project, based merely on a limited research (time & sources wise), there's a series for you! Of course, clichés are too difficult to resist (ex. the Israelis living in a luxurious villa, whereas in reality the majority of them live in simple building flats!)If you're really interested in the subject (complicated, as it is), serious sources are not lacking.. don't waste your time!

A long mini series like this one, four episodes of eighty-eight minutes each, enables the director to explore his subject in full detail. His subject is Palestine from 1945, and a little before with the concentration camps and their liberation in the background though that episode is in Europe, to today, right now today with the case of Gaza and the Wall. The story is built around the diary of a British soldier who was there from 1945 to 1948. The man is in hospital dying and his grand daughter discovers his diary and decides to go with her best friend to Israel for the vacation. Her best friend is an Israeli citizen and has to do her military service during her vacation. The girl tries to find the Palestinian friends of her grand father to give them back a key she has found in the diary and she is reading the diary at the same time, so that we jump from the past to the present and vice versa constantly.But the interest of the film is not that dramatic, slightly sentimental line of approach. It is the pretext to take us everywhere in Israel and around and to witness what the Israeli soldiers are doing to the Palestinians today, the light resistance among Israelis against the war, and the way Israelis literally victimize the Palestinians to force them to leave so that Jewish settlers can take their place. The Israeli army is there to protect the settlers not to keep the peace and so let that victimization go on.Then the parallel with what the Jewish nationalists did in 45-48 from wild bombing against the British army to the violence against the Palestinians and to the genocidal cleansing of some areas when they took over after the UN decision. Nothing has changed as for that: their objective is to re-conquer the whole Holy Land and nothing else because it was promised to them by God himself. And that promise is the backbone of the film.The backbone because the film builds a parallel between what happened to the Jews in Europe under Hitler, the terrorism against the British and then the Palestinians from the Jews in Palestine up to 1948 and finally to what they are doing to the Palestinians today, killing blindly when necessary, chasing the Palestinians in the streets in Israel where they still are, and invading and destroying houses in Palestinian territories in the name of their fight against terrorism.Terrorism is the main word of this drama. Hitler was a genocidal terrorist, but then the Jewish terrorists of 45-48, and the Israeli terrorists today who act in military uniforms against the Palestinians they call terrorists are seen as being just as brutal and inhumane as Hitler. You can see the idea that comes up from this constant parallel built into the series by the older period and the present alternating all the time and by the language and the situations that are so similar. And that conclusion, that hypothesis are absolutely unbearable. And yet no logical mind can avoid coming to it.Yet facts and events are there to prove we are not insane. So what solution can there be? The film does not say anything about the future that looks bleak for the Palestinians on the brink of being completely eradicated from Palestine and the constant war that makes the Israeli state a military state governed by retired generals.The only possible future is one state with all creeds and religions but this reunification of Palestine as a multi-confessional but secular state is just a dream. A dream, you said? When the military autocratic Arab states are falling like ripe fruits in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and military states of emergency are finally disbanded little by little in Algeria and even in Iraq, which is not an Arab state even if it is a Moslem country, we can wonder why Israel should remain the last one to be governed by generals, even retired, and living in a constant state of war against some fictitious and manipulated terrorist menace.But everyone is going to tell me Palestine is not ready for a re-unified state. And I will conclude that there is absolutely no reason why Germany could be reunited, Vietnam could be reunited, South Africa could be racially reunited, and yet Palestine could not be. That is absurd and history hates absurdity. So time will be what time will bring and que sera que sera. I will see it before dying.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

I have a thing about miniseries as much more can be put into 6-8hrs that can be packed into the 2hrs of a feature length story. IMO almost all of televisions greatest works are in mini-series such as 'Boys from the Black Stuff', Traffic' & 'Edge of Darkness'. Alan Bleasdale has always been the master of this format but, with 'The Promise', Peter Kosminsky joins him at the top. All 8hrs is used to maximum effect.'The Promise' shows how Israel was born in violence & how the violence is maintained in the present day. Around this Kosminsky has drawn a gripping storyline of the granddaughter of a soldier in the British Protectorate searching out the mystery of her grandfathers story. Thus Erin, the granddaughter travels modern Israel while her grandfathers story shows late '40s Palestine & the birth of Israel.Kosminsky has been accused of taking an anti-Jewish stance with this series but I cannot agree with this. The British & Israeli forces are everywhere and very prominent while the modern Palestinian terrorist is a small minority. This is how Kosminsky shows it and I believe that to have given more prominence to the Palestinian violence would have introduced a pro-Israeli bias.I do not give 10/10 lightly but 'The Promise' has earnt it as absolute top quality viewing.