Talk:The Promise (2011 TV serial)/ARTE studio discussion

Summary of the 50-minute ARTE studio discussion put online on 28 April 2012.

• Online at ARTE+7/Embedded in French page/Embedded in German page

• Participants:
  • Denis Peschanski (Bio at CNRS; Bio at fr.wiki).
    • Historian specialising in the 1940s, particularly Vichy France. Also a Socialist Party activist and local councillor. Supporter in May 2010 of JCall, the "European Jewish Call to Reason", sometimes described as an attempt to create a European Jewish pro-Peace advocacy group analogous to the American J Street. Co-wrote a preface in 2012 for a publication of the 1947-48 diary of Ben Gurion.
  • Michael Lüders (Homepage; Self-bio; Bio at de.wiki)
    • Political and economic consultant, journalist and author based in Berlin; Middle East correspondent for the weekly Die Zeit from 1993 to 2002. Studied Arabic literature in Damascus, and Islamic studies, political science and journalism in Berlin.

(Translation mostly follows the French language version. Contributions and improvements very welcome, such as better translations and direct translations where the original language was German).

00:05 Overall impressions.

Welcome. Broadcast has created a controversy. Partisan and deceitful for some. Balanced, very well documented to others. We'll be looking at comments from the Internet later. This film, is it anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian? We'll be talking about all of that with our two guests...

(01:25) You've both seen the film, The Promise. What did you make of it, what were your feelings about this film which has kicked off a controversy?

Peschanski

(01:35) My problem was that I have just published the diary of Ben Gurion for 1947–1948, so the very heart of subject of the film. The problem for me was not in the narrative, this is a well-made film by a good director, nor even with the evocation of the representation that the British military might have had of their mission in the period. But these are perceptions. We heard a lot about the attacks of the Irgun. But it was only -- it was not the whole Zionist movement, in fact it was a little minority in the Zionist movement. We are told...

(02:25) Could you explain what the Irgun was?

(02:25) Yes, the Irgun -- yes, it was quite important, not weak. The Yishuv, that is the Jews who were in the territory of Palestine, the future state of Israel, were very much organised by structures which were Zionist, socialist and nationalist. And statist. The central personality of which was Ben Gurion and who relied a great apparatus and on the Haganah, which was the underground army. And there was a right-wing element, very much a minority, both in the Yishuv and in the Jewish community in the Diaspora, and this right-wing element also had a military component, which was the Irgun. And there was even a split from this, which was called the Lehi, and one can also talk about their attacks.

(03:35) So the centrality of the Irgun in the narrative leads to a confusion, viz. that one might imagine that all the Zionist struggle, all the Zionist movement was this that in reality was a minority. (03:50) And also, it plays with the chronology. The situation is not the same in '44-'45 and in '46, '47, '48; and particularly the attitude of the British government to the Near East and the different elements.

Lüders

(04:15) I was very impressed by this film. I found that it is an excellent narrative, the drama very convincing, so that viewers will watch this film with close interest and attention. But equally what stuck me positively was the courage of the director, who has brought us his reflections on a theme which is often buried in the historical debate. In Israel, with the exception of a small number of historians, it's a theme that's not willingly or openly talked about: the systematic expulsion of the Palestinian population, at the moment of the creation of the State of Israel, and even before the creation of the State of Israel. And to present that in such a film, I found that something remarkable and I think that explains the criticism which has been directed at the film where it has already been seen, in Canada, in France, in Australia, because that does not conform to the traditional reading of history that we have in the West in respect of the creation of Israel.

05:25 "Partial and ideological" ? + a "process of expulsion" ?

Meyer Habib, the vice-president of CRIF, the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions, spoke of the "partial and ideological" vision of this film. When you hear this criticism, both of you, would you subscribe to it in any way, or not at all?

Peschanski

(05:50) Generally a discussion about the history of the State of Israel is better made with historians than representatives of current institutions.

(06:00) But, that said, I am nevertheless in disagreement with my colleague from Germany. One can't reduce what happened in 1947 and 1948 to a systematic expulsion of the Arab populations. Several mechanisms had the result that the part of the Arab population in Palestine was indeed strongly diminshed in 1949 and 1948. (06:30) But it is a combination, of expulsions certainly, but first and fundamentally at the start, at the moment of the start of the war after the U.N. declaration of a partition plan with two states, a Jewish state and an Arab state, in November 1947 one had first the departure of the Arab elites, who did what the villagers who went were going to follow, these Arab elites. (07:00) Then in the war itself the processes, not only of terrorisation of populations, that caused them not to return.

(07:20) But it's necessary to have all these elements in mind to then understand what happened. One sees it very well in the diary of Ben Gurion, he wrote there was a secret meeting of his cabinet (07:35) Once the Arab population had left, in their great majority, the cabinet under pressure from Ben Gurion, though there was a minority who called for return, said no: no return. Ben Gurion accepted the construction of a Jewish state with some Arabs in Palestine itself; but not those who had left, they could not return. That was the policy.

(08:05) That for example is totally left out of the film.

Yes, we don't see anything of that.

Once again, it is a very well made film. I fully agree it's very well made. And it has nuance, the characters are presented with nuance. I'm thinking in particular of Len Matthews, there one has something that works well. (08:25) But it is missing the key -- it is missing the key to allow us to understand what is the Zionist position, the key that it was a colonial policy, the British policy; while not forgetting that in 1947 England abstained on the vote. But the Americans, pressed by Truman, and all the Soviet bloc supported the creation of Israel, with France, and this is what led 60% of the nations represented to support a vote in favour, and so permitted the motion to be adopted by the Assembly of the United Nations.

(09:10) Michael Lüders, a reaction?

Lüders

(09:15) We're at the heart of the debate, which also has contributed to the controversial perception of this film. What happened, at the time of creation of the State of Israel? (09:30) You have just had one version given in this context, but there exists also another version, that one notably the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has in his work The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and on the basis of original documents, notably on the basis of an instruction of David Ben Gurion, the prime minister of Israel, one sees that there was a policy of systematic expulsion of the Palestinian population. Roughly 800,000 Palestinians were expelled at the time of the creation of the State of Israel and of the war, or the two wars of '47-'48. All of them were gone, not there any more. Roughly half of the Palestinian population.

(10:15) Now certainly one can debate the causes of this human tragedy, but one thing is sure, that is that the terrorist attacks, notably by the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, who became Prime Minister of Israel and who received the Nobel Peace Prize at the time of the peace agreement with Egypt, with Anwar Sadat, all of that has not been perceived in a representative way in Western opinion. (10:45) And in Israeli society itself these events are not understood, it does not like the opening of this question. Because if one raises it, if one asks what really happened in this period, one would suppose two narratives, hard to reconcile. On one hand, the Shoah, the suffering of the Jewish people, the exodus of numerous survivors towards Palestine after the Second World War, leaving behind them everywhere they had lived, and all they had had in Europe; and then, on the other hand, the Palestinians called this part of the history of their country the Nakba, a veritable catastrophe, and they are still suffering today. And I think that the film brings this wonderfully into the light. It is a fact of history that numerous Palestinians, half the population, were chased out in the period. What is the response to give them today?

Peschanski

(11:35) Could you clarify all the same, reply to a question I raised, because you have begun by evoking the 800,000 Arabs from Palestine who were no longer in what was to become the Jewish state, but you began by saying that these were all expelled, and then you said, in one of those turns of phrase, but Pappé also says it, (I can discuss that, the reference to Pappé, afterwards), there were the processes of expulsion, but the great majority left. The problem is not, for the great majority, the leaving; the problem is their non-return. That is where the question is. I think we have to clarify that for the viewers.

12:25 Arab opposition to the British

Also to clarify, we've had some comments from Internet users. One of the postings we received said the following, I'll read it to you: "Arabs also fought, along with the Jews, against the British colonial occupation." And another user wrote, against the film: "the Arab revolt against the British army is not shown". How do you judge that?

Peschanski

(12:55) About the role of the Arab population in the period, there was a revolt, a very great revolt, in the years from 1935 to 1939, which also -- an Arab revolt which led to the major change in the British policy, as seen from the Peel Commission in 1937 which foresaw the creation of a small Jewish state, but a Jewish state, to the White Paper of '39 which drove a cart through this creation. That was tied to an Arab movement, a nationalist movement, because as always nationalism was a creation. It is never otherwise. Just as Zionism is a creation of the end of the 19th century, the birth of the Palestinian nationalist movement is in the years '35 to '39. But [that birth] is not in the struggle against the British mandate, it is in the struggle against the possibility of the creation of a Jewish state with the complicity of the British mandate.

(14:10) So you have those dimensions. And you have the position of someone, the king of Jordan, King Abdullah, who had his card to play. For him the creation of an Arab state to come after the war, for the Jordanian king that was going to divert his power. So there was a deal that took place with the Zionists of Ben Gurion.

Lüders

(14:35) The central problem is that from the beginning the Zionist movement referred to the Biblical land of Palestine, the idea of re-creating a Jewish state in Palestine two thousand later, but at the time people started from a false premise. You know this famous formula of Theodor Herzl, founder of modern Zionism, who said "the people without land for a land without people". His starting point was that Palestine was an empty land, without inhabitants; but there were inhabitants in Palestine, and with the arrival of the Jews in Palestine, there was very quickly conflict with the native population. (15:25) Also, later it was said that the Zionist movement or the Jewish immigrants "made the desert bloom". It's true that they did that later, in the Negev desert, but originally they established themselves in the coastal part between Haifa and Tel Aviv, and there there were already a lot of Palestinians. And very quickly there was a process of displacement which led eventually in 1936 to a civil war which lasted three years, and the British had a lot of trouble to suppress it. They wanted at any price to suppress it, because they could see the Second World War coming, and they didn't want a new front to appear against the Allies.

(16:00) So, the central problem for me, which is a fact of history, to which attaches not the slightest dispute, is that the State of Israel was created at the expense of another population, the expense of the Palestinians. It was from politeness that I said that suddenly the Palestinians were no longer there, because I know that these are topics which very often emotionalise. The Palestinians did not leave of their own free will. This will no longer do. The official Israeli historiography says that the Arab leaders called on the Palestinian population to flee, to arm them with their Arab neighbours, and then to drive the Jews into the sea. That is the official history, it does not correspond to reality. These people were hunted out, they fled in fear of reprisals, and of course the terrorism of the Irgun had an critical role, because the Palestinian population were put in fear, great fear. That is the history that happened. One can't undo this history. But it has to be faced. And it's only if one is ready to do that, that one could find a solution to the present conflict because this Palestinian narrative of the Naqba, the question of borders, of a Palestinian state, whether the Israeli population is ready to face its own past, these are all essential questions, which are critical for coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians.

17:35 The Arab states and the war

Another point and another complaint levelled at the film: it doesn't show the entry of the Arab countries into the war, which rejected the vote of the U.N. for partition. Again, what do you both think of this?

Peschanski

(17:50) There was a process in two stages. After the vote of the U.N. in November 1947, there was a Palestinian revolt, by the Arab population of Palestine. So after the front against the British mandate, there was a second front. The mandate would potentially disappear in the following months. But there was a new front, against this Arab population of Palestine. And the war that ensued, it ensued there. One mustn't think that it was an easy war. Regularly between '47 and '48, as one sees very clearly in the diaries of Ben Gurion, at stake was the very existence of this potential state.

(18:25) And then, with the Declaration of Independence in May 1948, there began a third war in some sense, a war with the Arab states, and they decided to put an end to what had been proclaimed as a new state of Israel, all the Arab states, and the imbalance of forces was clearly enormous, even if the strategies of the different regimes and different Arab countries surrounding the new state of Israel sometimes diverged.

Michael Lüders, do you share this criticism, that it did not show the coming into the war of the Arab countries, who rejected the will of the U.N. ? Did that strike you [as an omission] ?

Lüders

(19:35) No, it didn't particularly strike me in respect of the film, because it's not the role of a film to reproduce in some exhaustive way all the details of history. It's a film, not a doctoral thesis. For the Arab states, the creation of Israel first presented a provocation. It was the beginning of anti-colonialism, and the creation of the State of Israel was seen by its Arab neighbours as tantamount to maintaining colonialism. It was opposed by many Palestinians, not understanding why were they had to give up half of their land for a new Jewish state, because they were not responsible for the Holocaust. They had the view that they were paying the price for the fact that the Europeans and the Americans had a guilty conscience because the Germans had been allowed to massacre the Jewish people.

(20:35) Retrospectively, it was certainly a mistake on the part of the Palestinians not to have accepted the United Nations partition plan, because the war that followed could not have been won by the Arabs and still less by the Palestinians. The Yishuv, the first Jewish inhabitants of the country, the Zionist movement were a lot more armed than their Arab neighbours or the Palestinians, so defeat was a foregone conclusion for the Palestinians and the Arabs. (21:00) So in retrospect it was a serious historical mistake that the Palestinians did not accept this plan for partition. But to be honest, you have to say that the Israelis did not accept this partition plan just out of conviction. But in Israel there was a much greater strategic intelligence than the Arabs and the Palestinians. In effect for Israel accepting the partition plan was a first stage in the consolidation of the state. But what were the frontiers of this Israeli state? It is a question that is still not settled to this day. There's no official declaration from the Israeli government as to what constitutes the Israeli borders. It's also one of the reasons why Israel has no constitution to this day, because to enact a constitution it has to be defined in what frontiers the constitution applies, which is not settled. There are powerful so-called revisionist forces which take the view that Israel encompasses the territories from the Mediterranean to the River Jordan, so all that is our land, including Judea and Samaria, as they call it rather than the West Bank. And in these conditions, one cannot foresee peace.

Denis Peschanski, you've been showing disapproval

Peschanski

(22:20) Yes, because I think there's a risk of allowing a misinterpretation of the way the State of Israel came about. Of course, there was the Holocaust, there were the populations who were victims of the Holocaust, and the survivors of this mass extermination of the Jewish people in Europe by Nazism, there is this essential component which plays its part in the creation of the state.

(22:50) But the creation of the state -- it's well symbolised by Ben Gurion -- was a goal before the Holocaust. Ben Gurion arrived in 1905, and as emblem he kept a diary from 1905 to the end of the '60s -- 30,000 pages of diary in Hebrew, about 50,000 pages in French, you can imagine -- he wrote history at the same time as he made it. Between 1905 and the Second World War he had a clear goal, and that goal was the creation of a Jewish state. So I can't accept that it is a result of the Shoah, because that is something that we're told the population could determine, even if it is the case that it was done after the Shoah in a context which meant that some countries at this time allied themselves to this creation of a state because there had been the Shoah, nevertheless it was a goal that had existed as a goal for a long time. [...] not the problem historically, cannot succeed with this kind of analysis of the borders, the borders honestly were a function of the changing military situation.

(24:10) To say that, of course they had the military superiority, and that the Arab states had absolutely no way to do away with the Jewish state... you have to put yourself into the situation. It was not the military of the '60s and '70s, not the war of today. They had people who had been there for one year, two years, ten years, thirty years, who relied for their equipment militarily on goods essentially from the Soviets, via Czechoslovakia, in '45, '47, it's one of the things revealed by the diary of Ben Gurion. (24:50) There isn't at all a sense of a certainty of victory. Or indeed then the positions of the Arab regimes would have been suicidal. So, really, I think you have to put yourself back, to avoid anachronism, you have to put yourself back into the position of the period...

(25:10) To not judge history by [..]

Yes, because when one puts oneself in the position of the period, the normal outcome was the disappearance of the new state of Israel. It wasn't at all for it to let itself be rid of these neighbouring Arab states. It's absurd.

25:30 Parallels, and terrorism

Another point of complaint against this film is a parallel that would be made between terrorist acts -- you raised it a little bit earlier Denis Peschanski -- in the comment of an internet user, there's a dishonesty in setting up a parallel montage between an attack on a cafe full of young civilians and the bombing of the King David against soldiers carried out by the Irgun, effectively a terrorist army but disavowed by the Haganah and violently repressed by the British.

Have you, once again, having seen the film, have you found a parallel induced between this Jihadist attack in the cafe and the attack on the King David Hotel? -- Michael Lüders?

Lüders

(26:20)

Peschanski

(30:25) I'd like to ask my colleague how he is defining the word "terrorist".

Lüders

(30:35)

Peschanski

(32:05)

Lüders

(38:30)

Peschanski

(40:40)

42:40 Representation of Israeli society; + whether it is possible to criticise Israel

(Israelis shown as rich, having swimming pools, etc)

Lüders

(43:10) One can't condemn a film for showing extracts from reality. There are millions of families in Israel, of course. This family that lives in Caesarea in a very good state is a well-off family and certainly not representative of the average Israeli family. But these elites exist. And also, in Israel, what I found extremely convincing, are the conflicts within the family. You have the son, who himself is a peace activist, who mixes with the Palestinians, and then himself is the victim of a terror attack, and then in another episode he is alongside Israeli soldiers who are opening fire on Palestinians who have shot at the Israelis. All the ambiguity, the schizophrenia of Israeli society is well expressed here. Of course it's not an exhaustive work which can illuminate every aspect of Israeli life, but I find this film presents some extremely interesting elements especially in terms of the family.

(44:25) But of course there are circles who don't like this film, and the principal objection against the film for these detractors is that it presents the story in a different way than the way we usually hear of the creation of Israel and Israeli politics. (44:45) This is something particularly true for Germany, where criticism of Israel is verging on taboo. We've just seen the controversy with Günter Grass. Günter Grass published a poem which sparked a lively controversy, which was strongly criticised not for its form, but the columnists and the media have been unanimous in condemning Günter Grass, saying Günter Grass, you don't have the right to speak in this tone about this conflict. And that's that. (45:15) What is put in place by this film is that it asks why one can't criticise Israel for what Israel has done. (45:25) Basically, someone who is reasonable cannot think the politics of Israeli occupation a good thing, nor consider it promising for the Israeli future without even talking about Palestine.

Peschanski

(46:15) Yes, you are putting two key questions. The first, Israeli society, it's quite clear that this family is absolutely not representative of Israeli society. But that is the choice of the director. The risk is to side-step the real complexity -- the plight, in particular, of the population that's of Sephardi origin, the plight of the Russians, the fact that there's a pauperisation of an important part of the population. You don't at all get any of that in the middle class, in the upper class of Israeli society, a very small minority. (47:00) It's true that there's no account made of that at all, that Israeli society is taken up in internal conflicts, a social conflict, for example last year's social uprising of August 2011 which were the epitome of social revolt through all the history of Israel, which called for a return to Ben Gurion, for a return to the welfare state. That's not about the Israel-Palestine conflict, that's about the hard reality of economic and social questions. (47:40) So yes I think there's a risk in the depiction of Israeli society, there's a risk of a depiction that the poor are the Arabs, the very rich are Jews, there's a risk of stereotypes...

(47:55) But you yourself were not particularly bothered...

Peschanski

(47:57) Sure, a bit. But what gives the diversity is not the sociology, it's the politics. You've got a mediator, you've got a veteran of the Irgun who was at the King David, so there you have the diversity of politics. You don't have the sociological diversity. That's a pity, it's a risk, in the circles which are the circles susceptible to the stereotype of the rich Jew.

(48:40) The second thing is very very interesting. It's the difference between the perception of Israel, in the present day, between Germany and France... [ MORE ]

(49:40) Does that critique also apply to us as journalists?

Peschanski

(49:55) (No, because it isn't at all the same in France, or Israel)

(51:30) Thank you to you both