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 and 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.
Cast 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 Lucas 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 Noa Koler as Sal'it
Subjects depicted in the serial 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 expulsion and flight Gaza–Israel conflict House demolition in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
Plot
Part 1
18-year-old Erin Matthews is a about to start her gap year. She is taken reluctantly to see her grandfather Len, in his eighties, who is in hospital paralysed by a stroke. Erin hardly knows him, but whilst helping her mother to clear out his flat she finds a diary of his time in the 6th Airborne Division in British Mandate Palestine after the Second World War. Her mother wants to throw it away, but she surreptitiously keeps it. She decides to take up her best friend Eliza's offer to spend time in Israel, while Eliza undergoes basic training for her compulsory Israeli military service. As they fly out Erin starts to read the diary, and becomes fascinated; it opens with Len describing "the worst day of his life so far" – the horror of liberating Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Thereafter the series intercuts between the two stories as they develop, hers in 2005 and his in the 1940s.
Len's unit is posted to Stella Maris base near Haifa, as part of the forces keeping the fragile peace between Arabs and the growing Jewish population. Their first job is to round up Jewish refugees coming ashore from a ship, who are taken to a detention centre. The forced showers and captivity behind wire fences remind Len of what he saw in Germany.
Returning to the beach Len finds a straggler, and is about to let her go when they are spotted by a passing patrol. Len is reprimanded; his commander emphasises the danger of Arab insurrection if Jewish immigration is not controlled. At the City Hospitality Club in Haifa, Len's corporal Jackie Clough introduces him to two Jewish girls: Ziphora and Clara. Clara explains that the club's purpose is to generate goodwill for the Jews, and that she is paid to be there. Meanwhile Len leads a search of the kibbutz at Qiryat Haiyim, but finds nothing. He is told that the entire secretariat at Stella Maris is Jewish and leaks are very common.
Clara invites him home for tea, where her father tries to get him to talk about Stella Maris. Len's superior Rowntree encourages Len to contact the Jewish underground, suggesting that a crowd at a rally would be a safer place to meet them than Clara's flat. However, when Len is approached, his contact is shot dead by the British forces policing the rally: Len has been set up. Out on armoured patrol a chamberpot is emptied over the soldiers. Then at the base several of Len's men are shot, some in the back while they are hosing down the vehicles, in a raid by Jewish militants. Len goes to see Clara, whose father apologises for what has happened, but tells him he is no longer welcome. Clara however follows Len down the stairs and embraces him.
Meanwhile, in 2005 Erin is staying with Eliza's well-to-do family, who live in Caesarea in a beach-front villa with a pool. Eliza takes Erin shopping and clubbing in Tel Aviv, cut short when Erin's epilepsy is triggered by flashing lights in the club. Erin meets Eliza's brother Paul, described by Eliza as "crazy", who left the army transformed into a peace activist. Eliza's father is a former general who criticised the occupation and is now a leading liberal. Nevertheless he and Paul clash over politics. According to Paul, his father's liberalism misleads people into thinking Israel is a normal country like their own; he says the truth is that it is dominated and led by former military leaders. Erin asks Paul to take her to see the grave of one of Len's comrades, who in the diary has just been killed in the raid of the Jewish militants on the base. At the CWGC cemetery she finds the graves of two more names from the diary: Sergeants Robbins and Nash, who at that point in the diary are still alive.
Paul takes her through a checkpoint into the Occupied Territories. In Nablus Erin hears him addressing a meeting of Combatants for Peace together with Omar, a former member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades. Afterward the two shake hands, and Paul drives Omar back to the Israeli side of the line. They are waved through the checkpoint, but Omar goes back to remonstrate with the border guards about a couple being split up, and is detained. Paul condemns the checkpoints as just a way to make Palestinian life difficult, and points to a stretch of the separation barrier where there is a Palestinian village on each side of the wall, arguing that a terrorist might live in either village. They go to a café, but when Paul goes back for his wallet, the building is blown apart by a suicide bomb.
Part 2
Len disciplines soldiers who are abusing his company's Palestinian servant. Later at the club, Clough teases him that Clara is seeking a passport from marrying him. Len takes Clara home; there is no-one in, so she takes him to bed, asking him to stay longer, but he has to attend a meeting. The meeting, at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, is a briefing on "Operation Bulldog", the upcoming cordon and search of Tel Aviv."Operation Bulldog" as depicted in the series is a composite of two real-life operations: Operation Agatha, a number of targeted actions undertaken just before the King David bombing; and Operation Shark, the cordoning-and-search of Tel Aviv undertaken immediately after the bombing. There is an explosion outside. Some civilians in a neighbouring room come to the balcony, and Len encourages them to move back from the window, but there is a bigger explosion. When Len regains consciousness, he sees that a wing of the building is destroyed.
In 2005 rescue teams arrive to help the wounded from the café explosion. At the hospital Erin finds Paul, just as his father arrives. Paul is alive, but his leg, arm and eye are bandaged.
Len digs a dead woman out of the rubble of the King David Hotel. That night, Len rounds on Clara for having known in advance and trying to protect him. Clara protests she was only trying to show that she loved him. At the base, the servant alerts Len that Alec Hyman, one of his men who is Jewish, is being given a "regimental bath" in retribution—he is being viciously scrubbed. Len breaks it up, and later thanks the servant, learning his name: Mohammed. Operation Bulldog gets underway. Len's platoon storms a house where one of the King David bombers had been hiding. But he has already been tipped off and gone. The owners protest that they had been forced to harbour "Irgun" members, but they are nevertheless taken away, and the British blow up their house. Mesheq Yagur kibbutz is searched, and Len discovers a substantial arms cache hidden in a room below a children's merry-go-round. Returning to base, the soldiers are serenaded by schoolchildren handing out flowers. Rowntree explains that they are anemones, or kalaniot in Hebrew: "red for the paratrooper's beret; black for his heart". Len gives the bunch to Mohammed, only to be told he has now put Mohammed under an obligation, and Mohammed will be duty-bound to offer him dinner. Subsequently he visits Mohammed and his family for dinner. They take a group photograph outside.
Paul's mother complains that the suicide bombers at the café are 'animals'. Paul replies that she should tell Erin about some of the 'animals' who blew up the King David Hotel, including her own father.
Erin is on the point of going home, but reads the last page of Len's diary and finds with it, in an envelope, a key. Len is facing prison, and has let down everyone who trusted him, wishing he could return the key to Mohammed. Haunted by this, and knowing her grandfather has been unhappy all his life, Erin decides to stay. Looking up Omar's telephone number in Paul's phone, she gets Omar to take her to Ein Hawd, which was the location of Mohammed's house, and finds that that village is now Ein Hod, a Jewish artistic centre. She is told that the Palestinians left in 1948, but some had returned to found a new Ein Hawd in what had been their orchards above the old village. An old man agrees to let them drive him, and they identify what had been Mohammed's house. He thanks Erin for taking him back, even though it had been painful. He is able to give Omar a Hebron address for the family, although when Erin asks Omar to take her, he suggests that Paul might be a better guide.
Erin and Eliza visit Eliza's grandfather. He is unapologetic, and tells them that his father, mother, sister and brother had all died in German camps. He says that his generation had been determined that the Jewish people would never again capitulate in the face of genocide, and want to secure land that could always be safe. He explains that the British stood in their way, so they wiped them out.
Len and Jackie and another soldier are off duty and driving through town when they are ambushed. Len reaches for his revolver, but two men with handguns shoot all three. As Len and Jackie struggle for their lives, they are ignored by onlookers sitting in cafés.According to Kosminsky, the sequence at the end of episode 2 was inspired by a December 1947 of an incident when three soldiers were shot.
Part 3
In hospital, Len shows compassion to Avram Klein (a Jewish militant who has been shot after shooting three British policemen),Klein is based in part on Dov Gruner . Gruner was executed on charges of "firing on policemen, and setting explosive charges with the intent of killing personnel on His Majesty's service". He had not himself actually shot anybody, although others who died at about the same time had. Gruner was hanged three months before the events of the Sergeants Affair; for this purpose in the character of Avram Klein the series has composited Gruner with the perpetrators of the Acre Prison Break. even after an attempt to free him. Rowntree asks Len to persuade Klein to appeal to the Privy Council to avoid his execution. Len finds Klein in solitary confinement in Acre, but he is unwilling to appeal, saying that every movement needs its martyrs.
Meanwhile Len has started giving Mohammed's son Hassan tuition in mathematics. Clara is getting hostile glances from people who think she is fraternising with the enemy.