Love and Surveillance: Politicized Romance in Peter Kosminsky’s The Promise

Given the central place that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict occupies in the lives and minds of millions of people inside and outside the Middle East, it is surprising that there are only a few films and TV programs so far that have dealt with this issue. The majority of those few productions of recent years are either Israeli or Palestinian.1 They have enjoyed little exposure in the European and American markets, and as a result left little impression on those who may have general interest in world politics but are not necessarily especially engaged with the Middle East's unresolved drama. This is why a British TV program like The Promise (2011), directed and written by TV veteran Peter Kosminsky and broadcast on Channel 42 in early 2011 (in the Sunday primetime slot), is noteworthy. The serial follows two stories: that of Erin Matthews (Claire Foy), a young British woman who is traveling to Israel/Palestine in 2005, and that of Leonard (Len) Matthews (Christian Cooke), her grandfather, who served as a soldier in postwar British Mandate Palestine. Retracing Len's experiences in pre-state Israel, Erin learns about the region's conflicted past and present and her grandfather's tormented psyche.Despite British involvement in that part of the Middle East and the focus of The Promise on its two main British protagonists (the young granddaughter in the 2005 narrative and the grandfather as a young British soldier in the 1940s narrative), the series is still a TV drama about the Middle East made by people who are not directly part of the conflict. The power of such a drama lies in its potential to offer much-needed critical distance and perspective, which are often missing from films made by Israeli or Palestinian directors and writers. Whether the series realizes this potential, however, is debatable.The Promise may be an unusual production in the contemporary landscape of British TV, one where Israel is a subject largely avoided beyond news and documentary programs. For Kosminsky, however, who came up with the idea back in the early years of the last decade, making The Promise was a rather natural career progression. His previous projects-including The Government Inspector (2005), which told the story of the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and Britz (2007), on the life of second-generation Muslims in Britain today-explored, much like The Promise, highly charged political issues.As expected, The Promise proved to be controversial and divisive: while supporters praised its bold take on the political situation in the Middle East, opponents-many of whom were members of the British Jewish community- linked the series to what they saw as a manifestation of broader anti-Israeli (often conflated with anti-Semitic) sentiments in the United Kingdom and Europe.3 Indeed, The Promise emerged at a time when the UK was increasingly being labeled by some pro-Israeli groups as the center of a global anti-Zionist conspiracy (with recurring calls for an academic boycott of Israel, for instance, or the recent campaign to boycott the UK tour of the Israeli dance company Batsheva). The fact that Kosminsky is a British Jew did not help to assuage those heated feelings and maybe even exacerbated them. Kosminsky himself, it seems, has been fully aware of the impact his Jewishness has had on the reception of his serial, at least in Jewish, pro-Israeli circles in Britain. Speaking at a Q & A session hosted by the TV network Al-Jazeera, he said: "If you seek to comment on the domestic or international policy of Israel, particularly if you are Jewish, you open yourself up to accusations of anti-Semitism. I get very nervous about the light use of the racism label."4This essay explores Kosminsky's vision of Israel/Palestine both in the 1940s and today, a vision that is mirrored by the conflicted emotional lives of the serial's protagonists. Indeed, the concept of love in The Promise is often marred by violence and betrayal and undermined by a national cause. …