The Promise (2011)

Strong themes, violence and sex scenes

The Promise is an epic and gripping political thriller that examines the origins of the Middle East conflict in events that took place under British rule just sixty years ago. It draws parallels between the violence faced by British occupational forces in the 1940s and the attacks faced by Israel’s military in the 21st century, finding surprising echoes of Britain’s responses to attack sixty years ago in the tactics in use today. It’s a love story that spans the ages and an antidote to simplistic thought.

About to depart to spend the summer with her best friend Eliza, who has joint British/Israeli nationality, Erin, an impressionable British girl on her gap year, is first dragged by her mother to visit her grandfather Len, who lies dying in hospital. Erin is not close to him and remains distant and unmoved as he lies silently in a coma. But it is when Erin discovers Len’S diary, which she begins to read en route to Israel, that her grandfather’s extraordinary past begins to unfold.

Len’s story begins during the last days of the Second World War when, as a member of an advanced unit of British troops, he arrives at the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen and is confronted with the horrors that lay within. With these harrowing images still burning in his mind, Len is sent to Palestine, charged with keeping the peace between the indigenous Arabs and traumatised Jews arriving in their thousands by boat from post-Holocaust Europe. Len feels an intense sympathy for the plight of these pitiful refugees and their desire for a place of sanctuary, a homeland. He expects that his peacekeeping duties will be a gentle conclusion to his bloody military career. But for Len and his friends the war is very far from over.

Erin, now in modern-day Israel, is warmly welcomed by Eliza’s family. With time on her hands, sitting by the pool in the sun while Eliza trains for her military service, Erin becomes increasingly absorbed by her grandfather’s story, set out graphically in his diary. She learns that he ended his time in Palestine in a military prison and determines to find out why. She begins to retrace his steps, embarking on a journey that will take her outside the secure bubble of the prosperous Jewish suburb where Eliza lives.