The Promise: Episode 2

7 February 2011

 

As Abu-Hassan Mohammed, an Arab charwallah, serves tea to Len and his colleagues in 1940s Palestine, Len is appalled to witness him being harassed and abused by some of the men. Len severely reprimands the ringleader. Mohammed is relieved and grateful and thus starts a friendship between the two men.

Later Len joins Jackie, Ziphora and Clara at the hospitality club to celebrate Jackie's birthday.  Jackie warns Len he thinks Clara is only after a wedding ring and a British passport, but Len is more trusting.  Clara seems much more interested in staying and making a home in Haifa.  When Len tells her he is due at the King David Hotel for a meeting, Clara asks him to drive her home.  When Len tries to leave, Clara seems strangely reluctant to let him go.  They end up in bed together. 

Len arrives at the King David Hotel, a little late for his meeting with senior officers.  As they are settling down to business a bomb detonates. The soldiers have just become victims of the iconic attack on the King David Hotel by the Irgun.

In modern Israel Erin is experiencing the aftermath of the café bombing.  She is taken to hospital where she discovers Paul has survived, but is seriously injured.  She telephones Paul's father Max and watches as he breaks down at his son's bedside.  Erin feels she is intruding on a private family trauma.

Later, Erin discovers from a recovering Paul that his own grandfather was a member of the Irgun involved in the attack on the King David Hotel.  Paul and his mother, Leah, argue bitterly over the moral equivalence of the Irgun attack on the King David and the Palestinian suicide bombing he and Erin were caught up in.  Furious that Eliza's grandfather was behind an attack that nearly killed Len, Erin storms from the house - determined to leave Israel at the earliest opportunity.

Returning to her grandfather's diary Erin discovers he accuses Clara of knowing about the King David bombing and suggests she tried to keep him in bed to save him.  She denies it vehemently.   However, the Irgun is clearly getting information from somewhere because an attempt by Len and his colleagues to round them up in Tel Aviv is foiled, due to a leak. Alec Hyman, a member of Len's section, is an obvious suspect because he is Jewish.

Certain that she is about to leave Israel, Erin decides to read the end of Len's diary.  The final paragraph is totally unexpected.  Len normal sanguinity is replaced by a tone of despair.  He appears to be facing prison and a dishonourable discharge from the army.  He writes about having betrayed his friend Mohammed, the charwallah, and refers to Mohammed's key, which he needs to return to him at all costs.  Erin finds the key in a yellowing envelope at the back of the diary.  She is puzzled and intrigued, as if she has stumbled upon a mystery which needs solving.  Despite the trauma of the café bombing Erin resolves to stay in Israel while she delves deeper into Len's story.

Len writes about how he has become friends with Mohammed and is invited to his family home in the village of Ein Hawd.  There Len meets Mohammed's son Hassan and offers to help the boy with his mathematics studies.  A photograph is taken showing Len with Mohammed, Hassan and other members of the family.  Mohammed's daughter Jawda also appears in the photograph.  Erin engages Omar's help and begins a quest to find Mohammed's family by going to the village of Ein Hawd with him.  She discovers how the Arab families were moved out of the village in 1948.  Descendants of Jewish immigrants now live in their homes.  However, some Arab families have apparently returned to the area and now live further up the mountain.  Erin finds an old man who remembers that Mohammed's family moved to Hebron, now in the Occupied Territories.

Erin and Eliza visit Eliza's grandfather Emmanuel Katz, the man who had conspired to blow up the King David. A steely character, he fiercely explains what was at stake for him and the many Jewish settlers who had had their entire families annihilated in the Holocaust.  For them a Homeland was everything, worth paying any price.  Though their allies in the Second World War, in 1948 British soldiers stood in the way of that homeland and Katz and his fellow Irgun fighters "wiped them out".

British military operations continue in Haifa.  Len and two of his men are on a routine street patrol.  They are listening to the Irgun radio station that plays out propaganda against the British in their vehicle.  They are held up for some time by a woman talking to the car driver ahead and Len starts to realise something is wrong.  Suddenly gunmen appear and spray the soldiers with bullets.  Len's final memory, before losing consciousness, is street life carrying on around him as if nothing had happened.