From Belsen to Gaza: The Promise (2011), British and British-Jewish identity

ABSTRACT

This article discusses Peter Kosminsky’s miniseries The Promise (2011) and investigates the intense public responses it engendered in Britain. The first part of the article explores how the miniseries takes the lead from the liberation of Belsen to engage with issues of British national self-perception. Drawing on the notion of ‘postimperial melancholia’, the article argues that The Promise explores important issues related to Britain’s past and present, in particular the lasting heritage of Empire. The second part engages with the intense reception of the miniseries among opinion makers and the general public, with many critics seeing The Promise as aimed at delegitimising the State of Israel. In thus doing, the article situates the debate within broader discussions on the supposed relationship between anti-Zionism and “new anti-Semitism”, and more specifically discussion of the role of anti-Zionist Jews. The debate around The Promise is a case study for the exploration of two related controversies. The first one pertains to Jewish/non-Jewish relations, in particular regarding the international role of Israel in the twenty-first century. The second one is more specifically infra-Jewish and revolves around the issue of which subjects are legitimate to speak out as Jews and in the name of which values.

KEYWORDS:

• The Promise
• British identity
• British-Jewish identity
• television
• British Empire
• Peter Kosminsky

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the two peer reviewers for their valuable feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Emiliano Perra is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Winchester. He is the author of Conflicts of Memory: The Reception of Holocaust Films and Television Programmes in the Italian Press, 1945 to the Present (2010). Perra’s work focuses on the memory and representation of genocide, and he is co-editor of the Journal of Perpetrator Research.

ORCID

Emiliano Perra http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9999-3035

Notes

1 On People of the Exodus, see Radio Times, Issue 2583 (10 May 1973), p. 35. The programme is available online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/6f0ea5ae-2fee-3a36-a7fd-4059d334899f.

2 The full list of episodes for Roads to Conflict was “The Land Itself” (3 October 1978); “Return to Zion” (9 October 1978); “War and Diplomacy” (17 October 1978); “The Mandate Begins” (24 October 1978); “From Rebellion to War” (31 October 1978); “Towards a State” (7 November 1978); “From War to War” (14 November 1978); “Nasser and Israel” (21 November 1978); “The ‘Palestinian Problem’” (28 November 1978); “End of the Road” (5 December 1978). All documentaries aired between 23:10 and 23:40 and were rerun one week later on BBC 2 at 14:30, thus granting the series an opportunity to cater to different audiences. The three episodes of BBC 2’s Dayan were “Settler” (3 May 1981); “Warrior” (10 May 1981); “Statesman” (17 May 1981). The four episodes comprising the series Empire Warriors were “Mad Mitch and His Tribal Law” (18 November 2004); “The Jewish War” (26 November 2004); “The Intelligence War” (3 December 2004); “The Hunt for Kimathi” (10 December 2004). The three episodes of Clash of the Worlds are “Mutiny” (28 October 2007); “Sudan” (4 November 2007); “Palestine” (18 November 2007). Information from http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/.

3 On these two broadcasts, see Radio Times, Issue 2320 (25 April 1968) and Issue 2843 (4 May 1978).

4 Small contingents of the Haganah and Palmach took part in the Deir Yassin massacre, as shown by Morris (2004, 237). The Promise’s decision to show from up-close the impact of the King David Hotel bombing sets it aside from Exodus, which instead shows it from a distance in the form of smoke rising over Jerusalem. These two different approaches highlight different assessments of Irgun’s terrorism in the pursuit of Israel’s independence. On Exodus’s relationship with the theme of violence, see Shaw (2015, 62–81).

5 On the relevance of Belsen in the shaping of British perceptions of the camps, see Reilly (1998) and Reilly et al. (1997). More specifically on the images of Belsen, see Haggith (2005) and Michalczyk (2014, 31–46).

6 See for example Kushner et al. (1997, 12). On the problematic nature of contemporary British Holocaust memory and its substantial failure in helping Britain rethink her national self-perception, see discussions of the paradigmatic example of the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in Stone (2013, 224); Lawson (2013); Jinks (2013); Pearce (2014, 131).

7 The miniseries’s title is thus not only an obvious reference to the land promised by God to Abraham, and perhaps to the promise made by the Balfour declaration, but also the promise of protecting the Arab population implied in the British Mandatary role, only to be betrayed. On this, see Hary (2016, § 9).

8 The theme of family and romantic ties being entangled with, and fatally undermined by, incompatible political affiliations in the final years of Mandate Palestine appears to be a trope of contemporary British-Jewish cultural work. In Linda Grant’s When I Lived in Modern Times (2011 [2000]), the female British-Jewish protagonist Evelyn Sert falls in love with an Irgun member; in Bernice Rubens’s The Sergeants’ Tale (2004 [2003]), the Haganah member Hannah plans to marry a British Sergeant who is kidnapped and killed by the Irgun with the decisive help of her own father. In The Promise the roles are reversed: Clara is an Irgun militant and her disapproving father works for the Haganah. I would like to thank one of the anonymous peer reviewers for reminding me of these two novels.

9 For a diametrically opposite interpretation, i.e. that The Promise reinforces “a ‘soft’ Zionist position” see Ginsberg (2016, 112).

10 This was also the view taken by the Special Broadcasting Service Corporation in Australia, which after “several discussions with some of the Jewish community affairs groups” after the airing of the first episode, decided to preface the remaining three episodes with a statement reminding viewers that it was a work of fiction. See SBS’s Managing Director Michael Ebeid in (“Special Broadcasting Service Corporation” 2012, 128).

11 The warnings are shown in Exodus, though; see Shaw (2015, 75).

12 Office of Communications, the regulatory and competition authority for the broadcasting, telecommunications and postal industries of the United Kingdom.

13 Relatively recent additions to this literature include Marcus (2015); Rosenfeld (2015).

14 For a recent work that reiterates the notion of anti-Zionism as simply a “newer, subtler” guise of anti-Semitism, see Jaspal (2014, 4).

15 For an attempt to go beyond (or around) these issues, see the study of the historical arc of post-Zionism in Israel in Kaplan (2015).

16 Julius’s criticism can be thus seen as a variant of what Mick Finlay has defined as “pathologizing dissent”; see Finlay (2005).