Mick Hartley

The Times Viewing Guide for the week ahead strongly recommends Channel 4's The Promise tomorrow night. Here's what they have to say:

The final episode of Peter Kosminsky's ambitious series packs a considerable punch. The naive English girl on her gap year in Israel continues to find out what became of her grandfather in the closing months of the Mandate, which takes her first to Hebron and later to Gaza. Just as her grandfather witnessed the massacre of Palestinians and watched helplessly while the British abandoned the Arabs to their fate, so she sees how the modern state of Israel defends its borders against the very people whose land they had taken Her grandfather's diary reflects his disillusion. "This precious state of theirs, he wrote, "has been born in violence and cruelty to its neighbours. I'm not sure how it can hope to thrive." It is refreshing to see an ambitious drama tackling a subject of such importance.

You could hardly find a better statement of the "official" position as understood in London media circles: one side good, one side bad; one side active moral agents, the other side passive victims….with the familiar assumption that this is brave, ambitious television, providing us with unpalatable truths.

Kosminsky talks here to the Jewish Chronicle about "the bleeding sore at the centre of world politics". Yes, I think we know what he means. Though he is, it goes without saying, entirely impartial:

Kosminsky insists that he is not coming at the conflict from any particular angle – he says he does not show partiality to either side but rather tries to represent the complexity of what remains one of the world's most intractable conflicts. "One does a disservice to a complicated situation by presenting easy or pat solutions. So I have tried to show right and wrong on both sides, and by showing the characters not as cardboard goodies and baddies but as people who change their positions and contradict themselves."

A man of the utmost integrity, then.

Look, he's telling us: just 60-odd years after the world found out about the Holocaust and everyone (well, almost everyone) sympathised with the new state, how things have changed!

Israel is isolated, loathed and feared in equal measure by its neighbours, finding little sympathy outside America for its uncompromising view of how to defend its borders and secure its future. How did Israel squander the compassion of the world within a lifetime? That's the question The Promise sets out to explore.

Yep – sounds impartial to me.