The Promise, by Peter Kosminsky, is a four-part drama series depicting events in Mandate Palestine leading to the establishment of Israel in 1948 as well as the contemporary situation. It first aired in Britain (on Channel 4) early last year, to widespread
condemnation by supporters of Israel.
In November and December the four episodes were shown in Australia on SBS, the special broadcasting, multicultural, multilingual channel never distinguished for its warmth towards the Jewish State. (And from 8 February DVDs of the series will be on sale, SBS has announced.)
In what constitutes a leonine tour de force, Peter Wertheim, executive director of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) has written a formal complaint to SBS Ombudsman Sally Begbie.
The full, impeccably documented, text of Mr Wertheim's magnificent megilla appears
here
But because it is so impressive and important a document, a veritable model of its type, I have taken the liberty of reproducing it here, though shorn of the footnotes that enhance the authority of the original. Needless to say, I've added the illustrations, to relieve the long text.
'1. Outline of complaint
....
The credits for all four episodes included a statement that the program was “produced in association with SBS-TV Australia”. The precise details of this “association” have not been disclosed to the public, but presumably it means that SBS must carry some responsibility for the content of the program, as well as for broadcasting a program produced by another party.
The complaint is that in direct violation of SBS Code 1.3, the series promotes, endorses and reinforces demeaning stereotypes about Jews as a group. All of the principal Jewish characters (and thus by implication Jews generally) are portrayed negatively and, ultimately, without any redeeming virtues. They are cast as variously cruel, violent, hateful, ruthless, unfeeling, amoral, treacherous, racist and/or hypocritical. The ancient libel that holds all Jews throughout history to be collectively guilty of killing Jesus has been segued into the equally ludicrous proposition that all Jews are collectively guilty of the wanton shedding of innocent blood, a staple of contemporary Palestinian propaganda. The series also panders to stereotypes about Jews being immoderately wealthy and having acquired their wealth unfairly. The cumulative effect of these consistently negative portrayals of all of the principal Jewish characters and of the series’ numerous misrepresentations of the relevant historical background in a way that consistently casts Jews in a negative light is to demean Jews as a group.
We assume SBS would never contemplate screening a series in which all the principal characters who are identifiably Muslim are either ruthless, murderous terrorists or morally coarse people who condone terrorism or sympathise or co-operate with terrorists. Yet this is precisely the way all of the principal characters who are identifiably Jewish are portrayed in
The Promise.
To be clear, the series does not simply convey demeaning imputations about Jews in the way, for example, that dramatizations about the events of World War II have often portrayed German and Japanese characters in an unflattering light. In the latter cases, the negative stereotypes have been used as a way of highlighting the character of major figures in the story. There is never a suggestion that the Germans and Japanese as a people are forever marked by collective guilt and beyond redemption.
The Promise is far more insidious. The relevant historical events (and their misrepresentation) and the principal Jewish characters are vehicles for attributing negative traits to Jews generally across time and space.
The Promise utilizes and reinforces racist tropes about Jews that, but for a brief post-WWII respite, have been embedded in western civilization since pre-Christian times and are not in any way comparable to negative portrayals of other groups.
2. The SBS Codes
SBS Code 1.3 relevantly provides:
1.3 PREJUDICE, RACISM AND DISCRIMINATION
SBS seeks to counter attitudes of prejudice against any person or group on the basis of their race, ethnicity, nationality… religion…
SBS views intolerance of difference, and racism in particular, as a serious impediment to achieving an equitable and harmonious society.
SBS aims to ensure that programs either counter or do not promote, endorse, or reinforce inaccurate, demeaning or discriminatory stereotypes.
It follows that the broadcast of material which repeatedly promotes, endorses or reinforces demeaning racial stereotypes of any racial, ethnic or national group violates SBS Code 1.3, irrespective of the frequency with which these or similar stereotypes are, or have in the past been, promoted, endorsed or reinforced against the targeted group, or against any other group.
Nor is it relevant that the 44 complaints about the series that were made when it went to air in the UK in early 2011 were dismissed by Ofcom (the UK Office of Communications). Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code
is in very different terms to the SBS Codes. In particular the Ofcom Code does not require broadcasters to aim to ensure that programs either counter or do not promote, endorse, or reinforce inaccurate, demeaning or discriminatory stereotypes. The nearest equivalent standards in the Ofcom Code are to be found in Ofcom Rule 2.3 and Rule 3.1.
Rule 2.3 requires a broadcaster to:
“ensure that material which may cause offence is justified by the context”.
The rule thus applies only if the material complained of has caused subjective offence to members of the audience which is not justified by the context. “Context” is defined in Rule 2.3 to include a wide range of considerations including the editorial content of the material and the likelihood that it will cause “harm”. In the case of The Promise, Ofcom found that offence had been caused by the negative portrayal of the Jewish characters but this was justified by the context in which there was also a negative portrayal of some non-Jewish characters.
These sorts of considerations are different to those specified in SBS Code 1.3 which requires an objective assessment to be made as to whether the material complained of will either “counter … inaccurate, demeaning or discriminatory stereotypes” or at least “not promote, endorse, or reinforce” them. It follows that even if one were to accept (which we do not) Ofcom’s reasons for determining that there was no breach of Ofcom Rule 2.3, this would not preclude a finding that the screening of The Promise breached SBS Code 1.3.
Ofcom also determined that the broadcasting of The Promise did not breach Rule 3.1 in the Ofcom Code which provides:
Material likely to encourage or incite the commission of crime or to lead to disorder must not be included in television or radio services.
A breach of Rule 3.1 of the Ofcom Code therefore requires that a broadcast does something more than simply promote, endorse, or reinforce inaccurate, demeaning or discriminatory stereotypes. It must also “encourage or incite the commission of crime or to lead to disorder”. It was only because Ofcom found that this last requirement had not been met that it concluded that The Promise had not breached Rule 3.1. In reaching this conclusion, Ofcom conceded that:
there were Jewish/Israeli characters and their actions that, arguably, could have led to members of the Jewish faith…being perceived in a negative light to some degree.
The basis of Ofcom’s conclusion that there had not been a breach of Rule 3.1 was that the:
portrayal of members of the Jewish faith and/or Israeli nation featured in the series would not, on a reasonable view, be likely to encourage or incite the commission of a crime (eg harm or prejudice against members of the Jewish faith).
SBS Code 1.3, rightly in our view, establishes a broader and more exacting standard against the promotion of racism than that contained in Rule 3.1 of the Ofcom Code. Under SBS Code 1.3, the promotion of racism against about Jews generally is sufficient to constitute a breach, even if the offending material would not be
“likely to encourage or incite the commission of a crime (eg harm or prejudice against members of the Jewish faith)”.
It follows that the material complained of does not need to rise to the level of seriousness specified in Rule 3.1 of the Ofcom Code (that is, encouraging the commission of a crime) in order to constitute a breach of SBS Code 1.3.
It is noteworthy that Appendix 2 of the Ofcom Broadcasting Code reproduces parts of the EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive (Directive 2010/13/EU), including Article 6 which is in the following terms:
“Member States shall ensure by appropriate means that audiovisual media services provided by media service providers under their jurisdiction do not contain any incitement to hatred based on race, sex, religion or nationality.” (Emphasis added [by ECAJ])
However, this provision is not to be found in specific terms in the body of the Ofcom Code and no reference was made to it by Ofcom in dismissing the complaints against
The Promise.
In any event, for the reasons already stated, Ofcom’s dismissal of such complaints is not determinative of the present complaint under the SBS Codes. The integrity of the SBS Codes depends upon the rigorous and impartial interpretation and application of its provisions in their own terms. The credibility of SBS depends,
inter alia, upon SBS being held to account when those provisions are breached, regardless of any extraneous considerations.
3. The Promise – the basic story
The series tells a fictional story about Erin, an 18 year old British girl, who visits her Israeli friend, Eliza, and Eliza’s parents and brother Paul, in Caesarea in Israel in 2005. Erin carries and progressively reads through the diary of her grandfather, Len, which describes Len’s experiences while serving as a sergeant in the British army in the 1940s.
The diary begins with Len’s description of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen Belsen in Germany by British forces in April 1945 and refers to the atrocities that had been committed against the Jewish inmates by their Nazi captors. The remainder of the diary focuses on Len’s period of service in British-controlled Palestine from 1945 until the British withdrawal and Israel’s Declaration of Independence in May 1948.
The Promise portrays Erin’s experiences during her 2005 visit and those of her grandfather in the late 1940s.
It continually intercuts between the two, juxtaposing and drawing parallels. The entire story is told through the eyes of Erin and Len. As Britons who are neither Jews nor Arabs they are presented as fair and impartial observers of the conflict between the two peoples. Both Len and Erin are also portrayed as essentially good people, compassionate and courageous. Even though they are fictional characters, it is clearly intended that a predominantly British or western audience will identify with them and will embrace their stated attitudes and opinions about the conflict, which in turn are equally clearly those which the author of the series seeks to promote.
The title
The Promise refers to a promise made by Len in 1948 to Hassan, an Arab boy who is the son of Mohammed, an Arab working for the British army whom Len befriends. In Episode 4, Hassan is shot by a sniper and is dying in Len’s arms. He gives Len a key and makes Len promise that he will return the key to the boy’s family who have just fled from their home in Ein Hod. It is the key to the front door of their house. In the chaos of the 1947-8 war Len is unable to fulfill his promise, despite his best efforts. The key has been kept in his diary ever since. Erin takes it upon herself nearly 60 years later to fulfill her grandfather’s promise by finding the family of Hassan and Mohammed and returning the key to them.
The message to the audience is that the British (symbolised by Len) were implicated in depriving the Palestinians of their ‘rightful ownership’ of the country (symbolised by their loss of the key) in the late 1940s and accordingly the British, and the West generally, are now morally obliged to ‘restore’ ownership of the country to the Palestinians (symbolised by Erin returning the key to the Palestinian family).
The story is premised upon the following view of the origins of the Israel-Palestinian conflict as conveyed to the audience by a British officer in Episode 1:
“The Jews and Arabs have been living here in relative harmony for years. But our victory over the Germans has turned the trickle of Jews coming to this land into a flood. You must understand, the Jews see it as their holy land. But the Arabs, who have been here for over a thousand years, see them as stealing their land”.
In point of fact, the Israel-Palestinian conflict did not begin with the events leading to the establishment of Israel in the late 1940s. The conflict predates by several decades the Holocaust and the Jewish revolt against British rule. Arab rejection of any kind of substantial Jewish presence in the country can be traced back to 1891,
if not earlier. The conflict has always had many dimensions, including a conflict of narratives. In
The Promise, the Palestinian narrative as summarised in the previous passage is swallowed whole and the audience is expected to do likewise, there being no accurate or even close-to-accurate presentation of the Jewish narrative. The Jewish narrative is either falsified or simply not told. For example, there is no mention at all of:
- the history of Palestinian Arabs attacking Jews before 1948, including the 1886 attack on Petah Tikva, attacks against Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall in 1911, murders of Jews in 1912, riots and deadly pogroms against Jews in 1920, 1921 and 1929, the Hebron Massacre in 1929, the years of Arab terror between 1936 and 1939 and atrocities committed by Palestinians against Jews in the period 1946-8;
- the connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel for more than 3,000 years, including the existence over many centuries of the independent and at times sovereign States of Israel and Judah, all of which is attested to by an abundance of archaeological and documentary evidence;
- the fact that the Hebrew language and culture of the Jewish people is a Semitic language and culture which is indigenous to the land of Israel;
- the fact that there were five waves of mass Jewish immigration into the country between 1881 and 1939 and that the Jewish immigrants established the institutions of statehood and civil society and a viable economy well prior to the Holocaust and World War II;
- the fact that the international community, as early as 1920, recognised the legitimacy of the Jewish people’s aspirations to reconstitute their national home in Israel and obligated Britain, as the Mandatory power, to “facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes”.
Instead,
The Promise puts forward the patently false suggestion that the modern State of Israel exists merely as a consequence of the Holocaust and the need to find a home for the displaced surviving Jews of Europe epitomised by Len’s statement in Episode 1 that “
If I’d been through what these people went through, I’d want a homeland too.” The historical and legal justification for the establishment of Israel is effectively ‘censored’ out of the story. As the home which Erin symbolically restores to the Palestinian family befriended by her grandfather is located in the heart of modern-day Israel, the unmistakable message is that the ‘rightful ownership’ of the Palestinians extends not merely to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but to the entire country, including Israel itself, the existence of which is thus portrayed throughout the series as wholly illegitimate.
The internationally accepted “
Working Definition of Antisemitism”
includes the following passage:
Examples of the ways in which Antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel taking into account the overall context could include:
• denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.
• drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
The Promise does not even pretend to address the deeper historical justification for Israel’s existence as the State of the Jewish people. Nor does it portray (let alone question) the decision of the Palestinian leadership and the Arab League to use force to prevent the implementation by the UN of its resolution in favour of partition in November 1947. As Professor Benny Morris, one of the most thorough, impartial and widely respected academic historians of the period, has observed:
“it cannot be stressed too strongly that…the events cumulatively amounting to the Palestinian Arab exodus occurred in wartime and were a product, direct and indirect, of that war, a war that the Palestinians started. The threat of battle and battle itself were the immediate backdrop to the various components of the exodus”.
The ultimate cause of the war, in the words of Professor Morris, was
“the intention of the Palestinian leadership and irregulars and, later, of most of the Arab states’ leaders and armies in launching the hostilities in November-December 1947 and in invading Palestine in May 1948 to destroy the Jewish state and, possibly, the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) itself”.
The Promise dares not trust its audience with a portrayal of any of these well-documented facts. The Jewish narrative is either denied a hearing or presented only in caricature. Instead of confronting history honestly,
The Promise unrelentingly portrays the entire Jewish presence throughout the country, including modern-day Israel, as an act of usurpation by Jews who, without exception, are aliens, predators and thieves and who enforce their usurpation by brutal, racist policies akin to those inflicted by the Nazis upon the Jewish people. The basic concept of
The Promise, and the premises on which it rests, are therefore not merely a gross misrepresentation of history, they also fall squarely within the above passages of the
Working Definition of Antisemitism.
It is entirely possible, though increasingly difficult in the prevailing post-modernist intellectual environment, to have rational and evidence-based discussions about the history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and about contemporary Israeli and Palestinian policies and practices. However,
The Promise is not such a discussion. It goes well beyond criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country and damns an entire national group, the Jewish people, as psychopathological. Worse, it uses the art of cinematography and its capacity to evoke emotions and shape opinions as the means to do so. This is precisely what the SBS Code against the promotion or reinforcement of inaccurate, demeaning or discriminatory stereotypes is supposed to prevent SBS from putting to air.
