A film-maker's eye on the Middle East
Writer and director Peter Kosminsky has spent seven years making The Promise, a film about the Arab-Israeli conflict. What has he learned?
- Peter Kosminsky
- The Guardian, Friday 28 January 2011
- Article history
Christian Cooke as Sergeant Len Matthews in The Promise.
It's April 1988, about five in the morning, 40km outside Kabul in Afghanistan. I'm taking shelter in a scrape in the rock, flattening my cheek against the cold surface, semi-automatic gunfire and the concussion of departing mortars beating in my ears. In theory, I'm making a documentary about young Soviet army conscripts in Afghanistan. In reality, I've been marooned on this "zastava", or mountain outpost, for days. The 17-year-old kids, who are the heroes of our documentary, fire back at the attacking mujahideen, in the grip of a kind of hyper-bravado. I, on the other hand, have leapt from my makeshift sleeping bag to cower in what passes for cover on this bare outcrop. "Why am I here?" I ask myself pointlessly, and not for the first time. "Aren't there safer assignments I could pursue, where nights are spent between soft sheets? Why am I obsessed with war?"
A quarter of a lifetime later, I'm still exploring that obsession, trying to bring to the screen what is, without doubt, the most ambitious, agonising and creatively troublesome film I've ever undertaken. The Promise, which screens on Channel 4 from 6 February for four weeks, attempts in drama to come to an understanding of the most dangerous and intractable war of our age – the conflict between Arab and Jew in the Middle East – as seen through the eyes of two outsiders, a British teenager and her grandfather. Erin Matthews, an 18-year-old just beginning her gap year, travels to Israel with her Jewish schoolfriend, Eliza. Eliza, who has dual nationality, has been summoned back to Israel for military service. Erin goes with her for moral support, taking a diary written 60 years before by her grandfather, Len. Fresh from the second world war and the airborne assault on Germany, Sergeant Len Matthews has been unexpectedly posted – like 100,000 other British troops – to keep the peace in what was then called Palestine. As Erin reads his diary, we travel back in time to witness, with Len, the war at the birth of the state of Israel. And as Erin reads, she becomes curious about the disputed country beyond the comfort of Eliza's seaside home. She starts to retrace her grandfather's steps, beginning a journey through modern-day Israel and the occupied territories that will see her solve the mystery of why Len's life was destroyed by the few months he spent in that troubled land.
War attracts nothing so much as cliche. Perhaps the greatest is that the first casualty of war is truth. For example, to my knowledge there are at least three convincing and apparently well-documented explanations of the killings that took place in the Arab village of Deir Yassin, one of the emblematic events of the bloody war of 1948. If we were to tiptoe into the minefield that is Middle-East politics, we had better get our facts right. For four years, a team of six researchers picked away at the story of Len and Erin in our two time frames, 1945-48 and today. We tracked down and interviewed over 80 veterans of the British Mandate in Palestine (Britain was the colonial power until 1948), studied archives from the period at the Imperial War Museum
, the Airborne Forces Museum at Duxford and at the public record office in Kew, where thousands of declassified intelligence reports from the period can still be found and read. We unearthed unpublished photographs and accounts of the perilous journey undertaken by Palestinian Arabs in 1948, fleeing their homes in the face of the advancing Jewish forces. We spoke to Israeli academics who had interviewed Jewish women used to befriend British soldiers to covertly extract intelligence from them. And we spoke to their controllers, the underground fighters of the Irgun Tsvai Leumi, who fought to a standstill a proud British army fresh from victory in a world war.
For the present-day story we interviewed Israeli Jewish boys and girls, conscripted at 18 in defence of their country. We tracked down children of the same age from overseas, members of the International Solidarity Movement, who had confronted Israeli bulldozers to protect the homes of Palestinians in the occupied territories. We drew on testimony from Combatants for Peace, Breaking the Silence and other organisations concerned with the uneasy and undeclared truce in Israel today. On my own research trips to the region I located and visited the site of the massacre at Deir Yassin, finding the former Arab village still intact but, incredibly, now being used as a high-security hospital for mentally ill patients. I stood in the death cell where Jewish fighters condemned by the British Mandate government for insurrection awaited their fate, visited the sites of recent suicide bombings and gazed out across Israel's protective wall, surely the most palpable and chilling symbol of division on our planet.
Our research turned up some surprising facts, counter to common knowledge. For example, for many years I had believed that the Israeli military had invented the strategy of destructive reprisals against the families of insurgents. If a Palestinian blows him or herself up in an Israeli city, the Israeli Defence Force will locate the family home of that bomber and bulldoze it. How strange then to discover, as we pored over records of tactics in Mandate Palestine, that the British used exactly the same techniques against the Irgun, part-precursors of the present-day Israeli military, in 1946. If British interests were attacked by a Jewish "terrorist", the home of that terrorist would be dynamited, as a matter of policy. Why would the Jews, who demonstrably defeated the British and their entire tactical handbook, adopt exactly the same failed anti-insurgency approach as their former masters when they in turn faced an insurgency? It made no sense but, as we were to discover, nothing is simple in a land where truth has long since been co-opted as a weapon of war.
Making the drama in Israel itself also turned out to be anything but simple. At the outset, it had seemed a wise decision. Nowhere else looks quite like modern-day Israel – the topography, the architecture, the physiognomy of its diverse population. Creating Erin's story elsewhere in the Arab world would be time-consuming and costly. And where better to stage scenes set in 1940s Palestine than in the locations where the events had taken place, where some key buildings survive and others could be readily recreated from local archive and memory. English is widely spoken, period weapons and vehicles abound, there's a thriving film industry. It ought to have been straightforward. In practice, it was anything but. When I dramatised events from the Bosnian war for Leigh Jackson's Warriors, I faked them in the Czech Republic. Scenes for my drama about Somalia and Liberia were recreated in Kenya and Ghana. I did Iraq in Morocco, Pakistan in India, even Belfast was carefully remounted in the streets of Leeds and Bradford. Never before had I attempted to dramatise a conflict in the land in which it was taking place, using ex-combatants and reservists as actors and extras, local technicians as crew, shooting events still raw in the memory in the places in which they had occurred. Scenes that look achievable on paper take on a lively extra dimension when you have real Israelis and Palestinians playing your roles.
One particularly difficult scene calls for an actor playing an IDF commander to use a Palestinian civilian as a human shield while moving through a dangerous area in Gaza. We had detailed research supporting the event we were depicting and, by chance, an Israeli soldier had been found guilty in the courts for using exactly these tactics in the week we were to shoot the scene. None of these justifications made the sequence any easier to achieve in the cockpit of unresolved animosities that is Israel today. The first actor I cast walked out during rehearsals, explaining politely that, although he knew these things happened, recreating such an event in a scene with Palestinian actors wasn't something he was able to do. I recast the part, outlining in over-elaborate detail to the talented substitute actor we chose what the scene would involve. When he agreed, I privately assumed he was a committed liberal, out of sympathy with Israeli military policy. But when it came to staging the scene, in the predominantly Arab town of Ramle with Palestinian actors playing opposite him, it became clear that he had recent military experience in the occupied territories. Eventually, he revealed that he was an officer in the Israeli army reserves, spending a weekend a month in uniform. When I asked why, if that was true, he had been prepared to accept the role he said: "These things happen. We need to confront them." And confront them he did, in one of the most distressing and powerful scenes in the film.
In episode three of The Promise, Erin travels to Hebron in the occupied West Bank. We used her visit as an opportunity to restage a scene from our research, where a Jewish settler faces off angrily against an Arab resident. The actors involved wanted to be photographed together at the end of what was an unremittingly aggressive confrontation. "The image you'll never see in The Promise," said the Jewish actor as she posed arm-in-arm with her Arab fellow actor. Later she told me that, in a long career on stage and screen in Israel, this was the first time she had ever acted with a "real Palestinian". It had taken the arrival of a foreign film crew, not realising the magnitude of what it was they were asking, to bring this thing about.
So what have they taught me, my seven years engaged with the inciting conflict of our terrorist-obsessed age? The most striking thing I'm left with is a question: how did we get from there to here? Like most British soldiers we interviewed, arriving in Palestine from the war in Europe, Len Matthews felt only sympathy for the Jewish plight. Having seen the ovens of Bergen-Belsen, his heart tells him that Jews deserve a place of safety, almost at any price. In 1945, that view was shared by most of the world. In the era inhabited by Erin, his granddaughter, just 60 years later, Israel is isolated, loathed and feared in equal measure by its neighbours, finding little sympathy outside America for its uncompromising view of how to defend its borders and secure its future. How did Israel squander the compassion of the world within a lifetime? That's the question The Promise sets out to explore. Its other purpose is to act as a reminder to all of us Brits who shake our heads and mutter "not our problem". As the departing colonial power, Britain was charged with seeing both communities to independence in good order. In Palestine, as in so many other examples of our rapid retreat from empire, we left chaos, political confusion, bloodshed and war. It turns out that it is our problem, at least in part, and we should take some responsibility for it.
The Promise begins on Channel 4 on 6 February.
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This film seems like another attempt to downplay Arab aantisemitsm and the Arab project to destroy Israel at birth. The film-maker talks about Deir Yassin, a battle during the 1948 war, but has nothing to say about the massacre of hundreds of innocent Jews in Iraq and Libya in the 1940s, whose families sought refuge in Israel. A film based on distortions and superficial leftwing cliches.
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I'm really looking forward to this, and I'm sure it will be highly controversial. I would love to see Kosminsky's Shoot To Kill again, about John Stalker's investigations in Northern Ireland; I haven't seen it since it was first aired. A Kosminsky season a few years ago included the brilliant Warriors, but there was no Shoot To Kill.
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An interesting article, and I'm looking forward to the series. Mr Kosminsky is a very brave man to tackle what I'd suggest is the most important but divisive issue in the world today.
Of course Britain was legally responsible not only for the creation of the Palestine/Israel issue, but also the now nuclearized India/Pakistan situation, and even Iraq which was a British mandate from 1918 to 1932 and then under effective British control until 1958. That's not to say Britain was solely responsible, but the fact that our high-handed and selfish interference in other parts of the world has ramifications sixty-odd years later should be a warning for all would-be and proto-imperialists of the day.
But as ever, as I think this series will show, it's the poor bloody people, the Jews, the Palestinians, even the ordinary British soldiers, who pay the price.
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The film will probably not please/annoy both sides equally... who cares ....... because both sides have problematic issues and the director is not an objective judge in a court of law.
All conflicts that are long lasting will show flaws on both sides ultimately the goal should be to improve the lives of both sides now ....ie if the ownership of a hill or border is to result in the forcible eviction of hundreds of thousands of jews ( destroy all settlements) what is the point likewise if Palestinians are thrown into economic ruin and constant conflict ( no compromise on ror,settlements and no end of conflict by refusing to accept a jewish state) what is the point , UNTIL GILAD SHALIT is released most Israelis are for being stubborn and difficult against gaza however FOR his release there is no reason that hamas wont be able to get economic stability with Israeli support .
Using arabic terms that are generally understood in the region also in Israel the goals could be
1. tadiya . ceasfire or limited conflict controlled as wortthwhile by muslims
2. hudna... ceasefire for a period of time that cn be broken when in muslim interests
3.salaam .. peace ....an agreement of peace that should be respected
4. sulcha .. a complete closure of conflict or disagreementIf the peace process will not bring closure best to aim for conflict management..............Economically gaza is now starting to improve and the west bank is in a much better position than it was 3 years ago and much better than gaza and it is Israel's interest to improve the situation .
In real terms that is what has happened vis a vis gaza ,hizbullah ,syria.
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'These things happen' Israel lives with the reality of the enmity of people who could have made peace and could have lived beside them for sixty years. Instead the same people have changed the landscape and have forced Israel to become a military power.
It seems from your story that you have investigated Israel minutely and harshly but their opponents are the good guys and getting a free ride from you.
Shame on you.
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Zamalek - your remarks remind me of a story about a news cameraman filming loyalist rioting in 1970s Belfast being set upon by a crowd of local women. He tries to reason with them - "I'm just doing my job" he says.
"Aye", they respond, "but you're filming stuff that is not actually happening!"
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Let's hope it deals with the core issue, the colonial war waged to create Israel in Palestine. At the end of the day it is only by dealing with reality that the Palestinians will get justice and freedom and the Israelis will get freedom and a future.
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HushedSilence
Of course, any film criticizing Israel is antisemitic. Destroying Israel at birth?... at the cost of Palestine! stealing Palestinians' farms, fields, olive groves, lands that they lived on for hundreds of years.
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HushedSilence
no, shame on you for defending Israeli occupation and abuse of Palestinians.
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Any chance we can see it before commenting?
No?
Oh well, let's carry on with the glib certainties then.
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theeightyonekid
. at the cost of Palestine! stealing Palestinians' farms, fields, olive groves, lands that they lived on for hundreds of years.
read Mark Twain re: the 'hundreds of years' comments. You can have sympathy for people as human beings without buying into myths that alter historical truth or that accuse others of 'stealing' without proof.
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HushedSilence
You're quoting a 19th century fiction author as evidence?! You cannot be serious, and still defending occupation and spin on abuse of Palestinians. Israel has a country, accepted even by the Palestinians. And you refuse to give them even part of their homelands. Shame on you sir.
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this sounds like it will be an exteremly interesting film, i look forward to it!
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How did Israel squander the compassion of the world within a lifetime? That's the question The Promise sets out to explore.
After reading this piece it will be interesting to see how this predisposed author explains his version of how Israel fell to such depths. I would caution us all, however, not expect a film devoid of bias, which of course is not surprising. This is after all The Guardian.
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TheVoiceOfIsrael
How can you complain of bias, with your login name: "The Voice of Israel"?
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'TheVoiceOfIsrael
How did Israel squander the compassion of the world within a lifetime? That's the question The Promise sets out to explore.
After reading this piece it will be interesting to see how this predisposed author explains his version of how Israel fell to such depths. I would caution us all, however, not expect a film devoid of bias, which of course is not surprising. This is after all The Guardian'Oh dear. I didnt think that blatant hypocricy was your thing. The film is not aired yet, but you deign to suggest that the film maker is pre-disposed? What do you think your comment is? Pre disposed perhaps?
Also, he does not claim to have a version of why 'Israel fell to such depths' he says it is the question he is left with - so you won't see his 'version'
Also, I assume that this article wasn't written seven years ago. Thats how long the rearch for the film has been going on. I dont see how his opinion is pre-disposed when it is based on seven years of research. It may be an opinion based on his own collated evidence, but pre-disposed it is not.
Why didn't you just say 'i wont like this film because it will involve criticism of Israel - probably' it would have at least been honest.
Voice of Israel' indeed.
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You say:
We tracked down...Jews...Mandate soldiers... Israeli soldiers...but no Palestinians.I am sure that you are honest in what you find, after all, Israelis aren't perfect and being at war is of necessity a cruel business.
But of course you didn't find what you didn't look for. You didn't examine Arabs and their stories or their behaviour, or if you did you rejected the material for this series, because it seemingly went against your hypothesis or the prejudices of your desired audience.
Not one word of finding a fault in a Palestinian? - come on, you're just pandering to your audience and your own prejudices. That's not art, that's screen pap.
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HushedSilence
I can understand your thinking, and maybe even agree, for the most part. The title is "A Film-Maker's Eye on the Middle-East". But by your argument, we should also include Britain, the UK, and many Western nations who have used and manipulated the Middle-East (which I would want to see too). I think this article is just talking about Israel... for now. And since they are sponsored by us and the USA, it is a story that needs to be heard.
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How unusual - the same old Israeli apologists try to undermine the film before anyone has seen it. Makes you wonder what they are so scared of - maybe educating the British public about the doomed attempt of their soldiers to keep the peace between Jews and Palestinians, and for their pains being blown up and murdered by the Jewish terrorist gangs. And just remind us who 'invented' the letter bomb, sent to the UK by those same brave terrorists. Well, it will make a change from the usual propaganda from Israel.
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HushedSilence
I believe I said that, just what you said.
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'HushedSilence
You say:
We tracked down...Jews...Mandate soldiers... Israeli soldiers...but no Palestinians.I am sure that you are honest in what you find, after all, Israelis aren't perfect and being at war is of necessity a cruel business.
But of course you didn't find what you didn't look for. You didn't examine Arabs and their stories or their behaviour, or if you did you rejected the material for this series, because it seemingly went against your hypothesis or the prejudices of your desired audience.
Not one word of finding a fault in a Palestinian? - come on, you're just pandering to your audience and your own prejudices. That's not art, that's screen pap.'
To start with he clearly talks about including testimonies from Palestians - so your entire premise is not based on the facts written before you. Also, your argument doesn't work. If palestinian views had not been included, and only Israeli testemonies, it is more likley that the Palestinans would come accross in a distorted BAD light.
You need to stop panicking. I am sure this film won't create a bad impression of Israel around the World, not more than Israeli's manage to do themselves anyway.
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Not sure how one film can be expected to capture the totality of the Mandate and the birth of Israel.
What one film can do is to further the conversation by presenting an untold perspective...especially through a personal story.
There is more than enough blame and horror to go around.
If this film enables just one person to view the Middle East through different eyes, it is well worth the effort.
Dawn (book) did that for me many years ago.
Paradise Now did that for me a few years ago.
Many thanks to the writers and film makers who continue to challenge our assumptions and broaden our perspectives.
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harris2010
It is nice that you wish to broaden your horizons however it seems you have been somewhat remiss in that you have never seen / read the periods before the sexy 1967 period and note the .1870's,1936 , 1929 and massacres carried out by palestinians for the most part against each other.
Perhaps you should take interest in the meeting of faisal and weizman as well as the opinions of lawrence of arabia as regards zionism, the period of 1936 is also of interest today if you note the conflict between palestinians ie the nusseibis and the husseinis ........ . the husseinis led by haj a amin el husseini was an organiser of the iraq revolt in 1942 (from berlin) and the british army recruIted the irgun to oppose it ...david raziel the leader of the irgun was killed in the conflict/
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Only just become aware of this production and already it sounds like a must-see. Thank goodness there's only a week or two to wait before it airs.
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Therebedragons, (28 January 2011 12:50PM): TheVoiceOfIsrael, The film is not aired yet, but you deign to suggest that the filmmaker is pre-disposed? What do you think your comment is? Pre disposed perhaps? Also, he does not claim to have a version of why 'Israel fell to such depths' he says it is the question he is left with - so you won't see his 'version'.
Therebedragons, you may not have noticed, but there is an eighteen-hundred word article by the author at the top of this page. I think that that may have given me an inkling into the author’s predispositions and opinions.If he describes the British army in an unwelcome land thousands of miles from home as ‘proud’ while part of the local citizenry are fighting to send them back home before they hang more Jews, then I begin to wonder. Then, when the author chooses a foreign violent radical group of Palestinian supporters, the so-called International Solidarity Movement, as a source of information, I begin to suspect predisposition.
Finally when I review the list of sources mentioned by the author and find them heavily biased towards one view of the Israel-Palestinians conflict, with other sources of views suspiciously absent, I become rather firm in my suspicions.
I do though believe that it is good that the author visited Deir Yassin, which will be forever a blemish on Israel’s fight for independence, and I also note his scanty attempts to provide scraps of the Israeli narrative. But the overwhelming tone of the article is heavily biased against one side in this conflict, and there is no reason for me to expect that his television program will be any different same.
For example, center-staging the story of Palestinians being used by Israeli soldiers as human shields is disingenuous to say the least. Such behavior by Israeli troops was declared illegal by the Israel Supreme Court years ago, and since then, soldiers have been court-martialed for such conduct. You will find the same isolated incidents among the British, American, and Australian troops in Iraq and Afghanistan today.
As for the author employing a local Israeli on the set and discovering that he was a reserve Israeli soldier who is called up for active duty every year, well that would be true of most Israeli young men.
But saying that “the image that you will never see in the program – an Israeli posing arm-in-arm with a ‘real Palestinian’” and to claim that it was the film-maker who had “brought this thing about”, well that is pure hogwash. Sure, there are not enough personal interaction on civilian levels between Israelis and Palestinians (and there is a reason for that), but to claim that a cordial embrace between them is a rarity, or that it required this film-maker to facilitate it, is condescending at best, and ignorant at worst.
And finally, to claim that Israel finds little sympathy outside of America (a country comparable in size and population to Europe ) is ridiculous, and if nothing else shows this man’s predisposition then this statement does it very clearly. It is the statement of a person who never reads such mainstream British newspapers as The Daily Telegraph or The Times, and who knows little of public opinion outside of the Islamic world and the hard European left.
And Therebedragons, as for you question:
Why didn't you just say 'i wont like this film because it will involve criticism of Israel - probably' it would have at least been honest.
Let me tell you that if I didn’t like people who severely criticize Israel then I wouldn’t like most of my family and friends in Israel, nor myself, for that matter (not to mention most of the Israeli news media).
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I too like the eightyone old kid am old enough to remember the horrors the zionist terroristsinflicted on the British troops who had lately come from the bloody fighting to liberate the ghastly unspeakable Belsen concentration camp. So by all means lets talk history CAPLAN
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mauriceeric
Indeed the period had hangings and floggings of jews ( and arabs in greater numbers) as well as the disgraceful hangings of 2 british sargeants , however the 100000 british soldiers in plaestine had as their main duty the carrying out of dispicable policies of bevin leading to a concentration camp in cyprus of almost 100000 jews and also the return of jews to germany.The total truth matters no matter how bitter and facts have to declared openly
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mauriceeric
Seeing that you are acquainted with the times perhaps you remember the 91 doctors and nurses massacred in the convoy in jerusalem and of the 30 dead of the convoy in western gallilee near kfar yasif both convoys were attacked and all the occupants massacred in arab ambushes in battles that lasted HOURS under a protection of non intervention of the occupying power and an active prevention on the pain of death for jews to openly carry arms and hence no chance of sending relief.
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mauriceeric
I'm afraid i'm not 81 years old: the 81 is the year I was born. I'm 29, but I love to read and study, this topic (the Middle East) among many others that are not so political. I hope I have good information. I suppose at my age I just want to say I oppose the terrible treatment by Israel of the Palestinians, and the slow and West-sponsored theft of their lands. I oppose many other acts of oppression throughout the world, including those perpetrated by my own country. Every human is equal - the Palestinians have the right to self determination and freedom and their own homelands!It is very important in this digital age for us to speak out on the Internet, in forums like this. Especially since it is now one of the best methods of communication, and there have been reports of Israeli departments set up to wage a type of public relations campaign on the Internet too.
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TheVoiceOfIsrael
With your login name, how can you still be claiming the article is biased? I strongly suspect you are very very biased, and I only had to read 4 words.
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Voice of Israel
he describes the British army in an unwelcome land thousands of miles from home as ‘proud’
Describing an army as proud after winning a war is not the same thing as praising them or giving them positive qualifications.
This is the complete phrase:
And we spoke to their controllers, the underground fighters of the Irgun Tsvai Leumi, who fought to a standstill a proud British army fresh from victory in a world war.
In fact, if anything he would be praising Irgun fighters. And you could say the film is bias because one of his most motivating scenes involves an aspect of the Israeli army that's deemed ilegal in Israel, but the author has comfirmed this himself in this piece, and the description of the scene gives a lot of credit to an Israeli as far as I can see.
For sure, we should all have to deal with out bias but I think we have to see if we ourselves are bias first.
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jamba4peace
the 1947 war should never have been fought ....dwell on it
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TheVoiceofIsrael
And finally, to claim that Israel finds little sympathy outside of America (a country comparable in size and population to Europe ) is ridiculous
You can't deny Israel has lost a lot of sympathy, be them for right or for wrong. Or we should say, the Palestine conflict has earned a lot of sympathy for the Palestineans.
As an example, many countries in Latinamerica who didn't recognize Palestine as an independent state have come out recently to recognize it. Peru is hardly the European left.
I don't think the notion is ridiculous at all. Perhaps the film has a few answers for that.
And I'm not a complete "Palestinean cause" supporter as I understand Israel wants to live in peace, and Palestinean leaders are not exactly peacemakers from heaven. I don't blame either side completely but I can clearly see who is paying the heaviest price.
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Mountgomery, (28 January 2011 7:08PM): Voice of Israel, Describing an army as proud after winning a war is not the same thing as praising them or giving them positive qualifications.
Mountgomery, we can argue that point, but I don’t think it’s worth it. I think you’ll agree that whether ‘proud’ is praise or not in this context is not the central point of my post.And regarding:
For sure, we should all have to deal with out bias but I think we have to see if we ourselves are bias first.
I will readilly admit that I am biased; I never pretended to be anything else and I believe that a little bit of bias toward Israel on this site does but a little to tip the scales slightly in Israel’s favor.However, I am not in the business of making a program for Britain’s TV Channel 4. I would take much less of an issue with the author if he admitted his bias as I do, both on these pages as well as in his TV program. It is the misleading claim of impartiality that is totally unacceptable from a man who writes an article such as this.
And regarding your second post (mountgomery, 28 January 2011 7:33PM) you will notice that I never denied that Israel has lost sympathy, a common occurrence when one ceases to be the underdog. What I did say was that to claim that Israel finds little sympathy outside of America (a country comparable in size and population to Europe) is ridiculous, and shows this man’s predisposition.
And I stand by the statement of mine in that regard.
I will add that I have a degree of sympathy myslel towards the Palestinians, despite them being my sworn enemy (at least some of them are). They are a people who have suffered for many reasons, part of them Israel’s, but mostly reasons of their own doing.
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CAPLAN
I DO NOT CONDEMN THE israelis as being violent beyond what is valid in war..find me a war that is fought more nobly
I think those 773 killed civilians (a figure by Israeli Rights Watch no less, including about 300 children! and also 4 Israeli civilians killed), white phosphorous bombed UN buildings, thousands of families homeless, the use of human shields by Israeli soldiers, and the full weight of 1st world army against a militia with AK-47s and homemade rockets - all in Gaza: is hardly a "noble war". Violent is not a strong enough word for that state-sponsored destruction. 100 Palestinians killed for every Israeli.
You can's spin your defense of oppression and theft.
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TheVoiceOfIsrael
I will readilly admit that I am biased; I never pretended to be anything else and I believe that a little bit of bias toward Israel on this site does but a little to tip the scales slightly in Israel’s favor.
Then don't accuse of bias in others, and give yourself a free pass. Israel is capable of standing up for itself (and often does, militarily and with lobbies in the USA). Your spin is not helping them.
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jamba4peace
from personal experience the plo did certainly not keep any side of any bargain as regards withholding rocket fire (just as nowadays only about 50% of the rockets that land in the south are reported in the Israeli media likewise in the north) troops are always moved forward in times of tension but using them is another thing
once the war started sharon certainly wished to take advantage of it the plo set the trigger as did the hizbullah in 2006
30% friendly fire is the norm in war and so obviously at least a similar number of mistakes are made when firing at the enemy but the accusation of deliberate murder and targeting of hospitals and schools is nonsense...........the Israeli courts have the power to condemn and punish any crimes of that nature .sharon 1982, president katsav, olmert and in the near future possibly liberman
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eightyone kid
better you never see a war and see how wasteful and inefficient and pathetic it is .. no glory there just pain and mistakes
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