By Peter Kosminsky - I am precariously balanced, 50 feet in the air, on a massive pile of shattered masonry. Beneath me, tiny uniformed figures crawl over the rubble, gently lifting and searching under the plaster and reinforced concrete. As I watch, a remote-head camera swoops past me towards a particular soldier, Sergeant Len Matthews, its pendulous arm snaking out across the dusty sky. It’s uncannily quiet; the only sound the tumble of small stones under Len’s booted feet.
The date is March 10, 2010 and we are in a car park in Petach Tikva, Israel recreating the worst atrocity in British Mandate Palestine, the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in July 1946. The Irgun Tzva’i Le’umi, an underground Jewish organisation opposed to the British presence in the region, had planted a massive bomb in the basement of the hotel, which doubled as the headquarters of the British colonial government in Palestine. Ninety-one people were killed and 46 injured, most senior government officials. It was an attack from which, some claim, the British will to govern the region never fully recovered and yet it remains, essentially, a footnote in the story of Britain’s tortuous retreat from Empire. Why then was I there in Israel, recreating the aftermath of that attack with an actor playing Len Matthews and over a hundred other cast and crew? The answer lies in the last few lines of a letter, little more than a postscript really, I’d received over 10 years before.
The letter was from an old soldier. Complimenting our programme about peacekeeping in Bosnia, he asked us to consider making a film about an earlier peacekeeping effort in which he had played a part. A hundred thousand British soldiers had been tasked with holding the line between the Arabs and Jews in Palestine. Within three short years this mighty force was hemmed in and harried by a tiny guerrilla band of Jewish insurgents. Exhausted and demoralised, the soldiers returned home to find that the nation wanted nothing to do with them. No memorial was erected to mark their campaign; he and his fellow Palestine veterans were denied the right to march to the Cenotaph in formation. Their apparent defeat at the hands of a rag-tag force of amateurs had sullied the reputation of a British military still basking in its victory in the Second World War. Like Vietnam veterans in years to come, they found themselves shunned, their struggle quickly forgotten. Would we consider making a film about those three arduous years, to set the record straight?
Seven years ago, we began the task of bringing this old soldier’s suggestion to life. We interviewed over 80 of the surviving veterans of the Palestine deployment, listening while very old men relived painful memories, often for the first time. Some of those we spoke to during the four years of our research have sadly now died but I did my best to embody the spirit of what they told us in the person of Len Matthews, a sergeant in the Paratroop Regiment. Like many we interviewed, the fictional Matthews has fought his way through the signature airborne deployments of the Second World War, only to find himself embroiled in a further conflict in Palestine. The emotional story of what happens to him is told in our drama, The Promise. Playing out over four feature-length episodes on Channel 4, the programme is undoubtedly my most ambitious undertaking in 30 years in television.
For many Paras like Len, who made the journey to Palestine after Victory in Europe, first word of their new mission came while at sea. Still struggling with the decimation of their regiment during the parachute drops at Arnhem, the fall of Nazi Germany saw them quickly heading east. Grimly, the veterans spoke of being told to expect 60 per cent casualties in the forthcoming attack on the Japanese mainland. Then came word of the dropping of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fear turned to celebration as 6th Airborne was assigned a new mission, to act as the “meat in the sandwich” between warring Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land.
Related Articles
[ The Promise, C4; You Don't Know Jack, Sky Atlantic, review
04 Feb 2011
Top dramatist calls for Palestine veterans' memorial
04 Feb 2011
The Promise, Channel 4, preview
04 Feb 2011->http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8303231/Peter-Kosminsky-on-The-Promise-his-drama-about-Palestine.html]
It’s a common misconception that the conflict between Jew and Arab in the region has its roots in Biblical times. Our research suggests that the two communities lived in relative harmony until the 1930s, intermarrying and speaking the local vernacular – Arabic. The burgeoning of Zionism as a concept coincided with the attempted extermination of Ashkenazi Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. Jews in their tens of thousands started arriving at ports in Palestine, often having made the journey from Europe in overcrowded, insanitary and unseaworthy vessels. These survivors of massacred families, some still skeletal in their concentration camp uniforms, were determined to carve out a homeland where they could be safe from further persecution and to oppose, with violence if necessary, any attempt to dislodge them.
Initially, it seems that British soldiers had nothing but sympathy for the plight of the refugees. Some, like our Len Matthews, had taken part in the liberation of a German concentration camp. Others had heard rumours, seen graphic newsreels, spoken to those who had witnessed the atrocities with their own eyes. When British Tommies were ordered to corral newly arrived refugees in cages, strip search and question them, then ship them back west to internment camps in Cyprus, many were deeply uncomfortable. Their behaviour was too obviously redolent of Nazi brutality; the Jews didn’t deserve this further degradation.
Forced to hold the ring between the arriving Jews and Arabs who had lived in the region for generations, Britain enforced its Palestine immigration quotas strictly. Jews fought back with ferocity and cunning. In many ways the Brits bore the brunt of Jewish determination never again to remain passive in the face of an enemy. British soldiers who had fought the Germans for six long years now found themselves branded Nazis, a particularly bitter pill. A large conscript force, they presented an easy target for a highly motivated Jewish guerrilla army, many of whose leaders had been trained in insurgency tactics by Britain for use behind enemy lines in the recent war. Slowly, British sympathy for the plight of the Jews waned, as squaddies out on the town found themselves increasingly falling victim to kidnappings, bombings and shootings, often in broad daylight. In one disturbing incident which we dramatise, described in a report written in December 1947, three soldiers were shot at close range in a busy commercial street by gunmen who melted away into the crowds. The soldier describes how he lay bleeding on the ground but no one moved to help him. Life continued around him as if nothing had happened. Eventually, he dragged himself back into his Jeep and, clutching his stomach wound, drove himself to hospital. One of his comrades had to work the pedals as he began to lose the use of his legs. It was incidents like this which ensured that, by the time they left Palestine in May 1948, the attitude of the average Tommy had undergone a complete change. The truth is, many of them felt hurt by the hostility of the Jews, which they found incomprehensible, ungrateful. “They were happy enough to accept our help in the war,” one said.
At its simplest level, in telling this story in drama form, I’m just responding to a suggestion written in a letter over a decade ago. But, in imagining a character based on the veterans of the Palestine campaign, in interviewing old men still brooding half a century later on those three dark years of their lives, I’ve found myself moved and incensed in equal measure. In 1945, while Britain was focused on postwar bankruptcy and independence for India, these men traded a demob suit and family reunions for a bitter conflict in Mandate Palestine. They were carrying out British policy, even if it’s a policy we would now like to quietly forget. They deserve our gratitude, our respect and, above all, their national memorial.
- Peter Kosminsky’s drama 'The Promise' begins on Sunday 6 February on Channel 4 at 9.00pm