The Forsaken Promise

The British failure to implement the Balfour Declaration of 1917—in which the government pledged to help establish a Jewish state in Palestine—is the subject of Hugh Kitson's unabashedly Zionist documentary The Forsaken Promise. After the end of WWI, the United Nations awarded Britain a mandate for the region, but in the following years British authorities not only ignored the Balfour commitment, but systematically stymied Jewish immigration (even with the knowledge that it would condemn many to death in Nazi concentration camps), confined resident Jews in Palestine to a limited area west of the Jordan, and ultimately encouraged Arab hostility against them. Narrated by Ian Cullen, the film combines archival footage and stills together with interviews of scholars and surviving eyewitnesses to fashion an often moving indictment of English policy (with British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, who sent the Holocaust survivors aboard the steamer Exodus back to Germany in 1947, singled out for special opprobrium). The Forsaken Promise closes with the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 (and subsequent victories over Arab attempts to crush it), along with remarks by an evangelical Christian who both suggests that the emergence of Israel was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy and that England's loss of empire can be read as a sign of divine displeasure with the U.K.'s anti-Zionist policies. DVD extras include a 45-minute abridged version of the two-hour film. Despite a somewhat strident tone, this is recommended on the basis of the excellent source materials scattered throughout. Aud: P. (F. Swietek)