Ilse van Heusden writes articles about Israel for the Dutch daily Trouw. She describes activities that might be seen as admirable by most people, but manages to slant the story so it is an attack on Israel. In doing this, she makes use of accusations and insinuations reminiscent of classic anti-Semitic rants and with little concern for the accuracy of her facts.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) complained on January 10, 2012 to the Australian broadcaster SBS about the British-made television series ‘The Promise’, which it says conveys anti-Jewish stereotypes. The four episodes of the series were screened on successive Sunday evenings beginning on 27 November 2011.

The Jewish umbrella body alleges that 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 complaint adds that “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 letter goes on to say that 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.”

The Jewish organization's 31-page pamphlet states "the series shamelessly and persistently utilizes the anti-Semitic motif of the greedy Jew.” The report can be read here.

The Promise is a television serial in four episodes written and directed by British filmmaker Peter Kosminsky, with music by Debbie Wiseman, which premiered on 6 February 2011 on Channel 4 in the UK. Kosminsky says he took on what he describes as "the bleeding sore at the centre of world politics." Overnight ratings in the UK for The Promise were 1.8 million for the first episode, followed by 1.2 million, 1.3 million, and 1.2 million viewers for the three remaining episodes.

Peter Kosminsky is one of Britain's most acclaimed directors of hard-hitting television drama. He grew up in an atheist household in Stanmore, North London. Kosminsky is, as he puts it "racially Jewish"; his paternal grandfather came to Britain, aged three, as a refugee from pogroms in Poland and his grandmother is an Austrian refugee from the Nazis. He says: “I'm very, very proud to call myself British. I'm proud of being a Jew, too, but it's not who I am.”

His Communist father, who started out sewing pockets for Savile Row tailors, sent his son to Haberdashers' Aske's, a British independent school for boys, with Oxford in mind since approximately one fifth of the student body goes on to study at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In 1997 both the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail named Haberdashers' the best school in the nation. Kosminsky read chemistry at Oxford but spent much of his time involved in student theatre.

The series tells a fictional story about Erin, an 18-year-old British girl who visits her Israeli friend Eliza, the daughter of wealthy Israeli-Jewish parents, and brother Paul in Israel in 2005. Eliza is called back to Israel for her National Service and invites Erin along to spend the summer with her family. En route, Erin starts to read her grandfather Len’s diary which describes his experiences while serving as a sergeant in the British army in Palestine at the end of WWII. Moved by his account and the realization he wasn’t much older than her when he wrote the diary, Erin retraces his steps in modern day Israel.

The entire story is told through the eyes of Erin and Len, continually intercutting between the two, juxtaposing and drawing parallels. The title The Promise refers to a promise made by Len in 1948 to Hassan, an Arab boy. 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 of their house to the boy’s family who has just fled from their home in Ein Hod. Len is unable to fulfill his promise and 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.

According to the ECAJ letter, executive director Peter Wertheim says that the series’ distorted and unbalanced presentation of the establishment of the State of Israel falls within the internationally accepted working definition of anti-Semitism, “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”.

“The Promise unrelentingly portrays the entire Jewish presence throughout the country … 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,” Wertheim wrote.

In its complaint, ECAJ says that ‘The message to the audience is that the British (symbolized by Len) were implicated in depriving the Palestinians of their ‘rightful ownership’ of the country (symbolized 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 (symbolized by Erin returning the key to the Palestinian family).”

The letter adds that the TV series “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 favor of partition in November 1947.”

One suspects that the only reason for selecting the year 2005 as the setting for Erin’s visit to Gaza (when the series was in fact filmed in 2010) is because Israel in fact dismantled all settlements in Gaza and withdrew all its military personnel and civilians in August-September of that year, so such an episode in a post-2005 setting would be nonsensical.

Alongside the letter, a breakdown of the series highlighted specific scenes or comments that show Jewish characters to be violent, racist oppressors and that reinforce age-old stereotypes, such as Jews being wealthy. The breakdown contrasts the portrayal with Arab characters, who are all shown as peaceful victims. Arab attacks, incitement and terrorism against Jews from the 1880s to the present day are either minimized or ignored, while actions of Jewish underground groups in the 1940s and of the IDF today are, by comparison, shown in graphic detail and not placed in any context.

Comparing The Promise to infamous Nazi propaganda film Jud Suss, Wertheim wrote that both interpreted historical events not only as a tragedy, but as a tale of “Jewish wrongdoing”, and that both “made liberal use of anti-Jewish stereotypes”.

“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 cooperate with terrorists. Yet this is precisely the way all of the principal character who are identifiably Jewish are portrayed,” he wrote.

Expressing his concern, Wertheim said, “In terms of SBS, we simply want a determination that the content of the series breached the SBS codes and that they shouldn’t have screened it. “If that is the case and they make a finding that it breached SBS’s code then it is my understanding they will have to stop selling it out of their store as well.”

Previously in Britain, the press attaché at the Israeli embassy in London condemned the drama to The Jewish Chronicle as the worst example of anti-Israel propaganda he had ever seen on television, saying it "created a new category of hostility towards Israel".

The Zionist Federation and the Board of Deputies of British Jews both also lodged letters of complaint. The Jewish Chronicle itself took the view that rather than "attempt to tell both sides of what is a complex and contentious story", the series had turned out to be "a depressing study in how to select historical facts to convey a politically loaded message."

Writing in The Independent, novelist Howard Jacobson said that in The Promise "Just about every Palestinian was sympathetic to look at, just about every Jew was not. While most Palestinians might fairly be depicted as living in poor circumstances, most Israeli Jews might not be fairly depicted as living in great wealth...

Though I, too, have found Palestinians to be people of immense charm, I could only laugh in derision at The Promise every time another shot of soft-eyed Palestinians followed another shot of hard-faced Jews."

Jonathan Freedland of the UK newspaper ‘The Guardian’ accused Kosminsky of using anti-Semitic stereotypes. The Board of Deputies of British Jews also complained, but Ofcom, the UK’s regulatory watchdog for the TV and film industry, said the program was not in breach of any of its guidelines. Kosminsky rejected the criticism, saying that his plot was based on interviews with 80 British veterans who served in Mandatory Palestine until 1948 and who he says had become more and more anti-Jewish during their service there.

In France, the subscription channel Canal+ aired the drama under the title The Promise: Le Serment over four weeks starting on 21 March 2011, in a prime-time Monday evening slot that it tends to use for more serious or historical drama series.

A letter of protest to the channel was written by the President of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF), arguing that "the viewer sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however complex, only as a consequence of violence and cruelty of the Jews, who are represented as so extreme that if any empathy towards them is excluded."

Further Reading:

Report on anti-Semitism in Australia for the year 2010/2011

Israeli Dance Club banned from Australian Multicultural Folk Dance Festival

David Southwick fights hatred in Australia

Neo-Nazis Organize Music Festival in Australia

Australian Student Website, Hotbed of Anti-Semitism

Australia: School text accused of anti-Semitism

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Vedrana Rudan, a renowned Croatian journalist and writer, uses her public stature in order to promote anti-Semitism in Croatia. She is famous for her radical and unconventional opinions, vulgar language, showy public appearances, politically incorrect speech, and for never holding anything back. Her blunt view of current events has gained her notice and popularity, which she constantly uses to promote anti-Semitic views and Jewish conspiracy theories.

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