The BBC has a new series, The Honourable Woman, starting next Thursday.
It is about a Jewish woman on a one woman peace mission to the Middle East. Wonder who the villains will be.
Gyllenhaal plays Nessa Stein, a British citizen but an Israeli Jew by origin, whose father– a Zionist gunrunner – was murdered in front of her when she was a child. She has inherited his ill-gotten fortune and used it to create a foundation that forges relationships between Israel and Palestine. When we first see Nessa, she announces a contract to lay fibre-optic cables in the West Bank, but the ghosts of the past haunt her and the internecine plot shows that her father’s murderous legacy is a curse.
Another daunting aspect of The Honourable Woman was its subject matter, bound to provoke strong reactions. “[The Israel-Palestine question] is so polarising because everyone has such a tight grip on their feelings. Throughout the eight hours we veer from one way to another and people will say, ‘Oh my God, they are being totally pro-Israeli or totally pro-Palestinian.’ But because the piece has been written with such compassion, I hope people will loosen their grip on either side.”
This may sound naive but Gyllenhaal is aware that a few hours of drama is unlikely to aid the peace process and she was sensitive to the intransigence of the situation throughout filming.
“It’s about Israel and Palestine, refracted through the prism of a family,” Blick explains, fully aware that this sounds like a tough sell. He reveals that he took the idea to Janice Hadlow, the controller of BBC2, who made two recommendations. “She said, ‘Not too much sand’, by which she meant, ‘Make it make sense to a UK audience,’” Blick says. And the other? “The other was, ‘Don’t kill too many children…’” he says, laughing.
It casts Gyllenhaal as Nessa Stein, a British businesswoman with a bird’s-eye view of the intractable conflict in the Middle East. Her father’s company sold munitions; Stein, though, wants it be a force for good, and has moved the company into telecommunications. It’s an eight-part thriller that finds as much drama in affluent London as it does in the West Bank, and articulates the conflict there in personal as well as political terms. It travels back and forth in time, revealing ghastly truths in a beguilingly casual way.
I am certain that it would be foolish to prejudge the BBC and the arts world when it comes to creating the ‘ghastly truth’ about Israel and the Palestinians, and all without killing ‘too many children’….based upon the nefarious activities of a Zionist father who flooded the Middle East with arms, a daughter who wants to right his ‘wrongs’, and a murdered Palestinian businessman.
Any bets there will be a Palestinian suicide bomber blowing himself up in a restaurant, ‘driven’ to do the deed by the oppressive and vicious illegal occupation of the West Bank by the nazi-like, Zionist IDF.
Enjoy.
It is, of course, a work of fiction, if by all accounts gaining inspiration from the same rather limited pool more factual fare is produced.
http://bbcwatch.org/2014/06/30/when-does-the-bbc-call-a-kidnapping-a-kidnapping/
In the spirit of those West End theatre posters citing reviews, maybe it could be refracted through a prism (the new interpreted event or enhanced narrative?) and called ‘unique!’?
“Don’t kill too many children…’” he says, laughing”
Landing like a Grad in a playground at a school near you
Good to have a sense of humour, but maybe easier to laugh when a £4bpa propaganda machine opens its chequebook and airwaves up…. again.
The Beeboids never ask this important question. When has there ever been a country called Palestine?
Ill gotten fortune – Zionist gun-runner? Anyone specifically in mind? Those attempting to help the fledging State of Israel didn’t make money out of it and didn’t sell to Israel’s enemies i.e. essentially all Israel’s neighbours.
The major arms dealers are the states, for example Great Britain which happily sell to Israel’s enemies, for example Saudi Arabia but find moral ‘reasons’ not to sell to Israel. (In the interests of accuracy there are relatively small contracts, which on examination turn out to be Israeli companies incorporated in the UK to take advantage of EU trade agreements.
A quick surf to Wikipedia came out with this list of Notable arms dealers: Sarkis Soghanalian, Samuel Cummings, Dale Stoffel, Viktor Bout, Moosa Bin Shamsher, Leonid Minin, Monzer al-Kassar, Adnan Khashoggi and Pierre Beaumarchais. Not a Zionist in the bunch!
I hope I’m wrong but starting with a false premise smells of agitprop.
How about a Muslim woman (how about one of Khashoggi, al-Kassar or Bin Shamsher’s daughters?) repulsed by her father’s arms trading coming to Israel to forge relations with Palestine? Too implausible for the BBC? Rich Jews, are there any other kind, are the ticket.
Five Minutes for Israel has expanded on this point. http://5mfi.com/honourable-woman-dishonourable-bbc/
“She said, ‘Not too much sand’, by which she meant, ‘Make it make sense to a UK audience,’” Blick says.
Not the explanation that comes first to mind.
How about “Try not to remake Lawrence of Arabia. We don’t want to jeopardise our resale rights in the Arab market”.
There is no ‘Ghastly Truth’ about Israel. We are (were UK) a protectorate of Israel proposed in 1939 and that is being gradually wittered away by being within the EU. Israel is not perfect but it is a far, far better place to live in than any of its troubled neighbours fuelled by cheap oil, tribal hate, suspicion and a multitude of religious wars going back thousands of years. BBC is famous for being anti-jewish and coupled with pro-islamic EU we can expect an impending disaster to form by sponsoring terrorism and fanatical freedom fighters ‘homegrown’ in the UK. Interestingly in 1920’s it was the Labour who promoted the Jewish state (now it opposes it).
http://www.us-uk-interventions.org/Israel_and_Palestine.html
Time Stamp is 30/1903/06/14
Every man and his dog have been reporting for the past hour or so that the bodies of the 3 boys kidnapped in the West Bank have been found, guess which major News Orq reports a different headline:
The bodies were found hours ago, look at the bottom of the screen dump, the bBC even reports other news orgs as saying the bodies have been found, but from the bbC we get:
The students were trying to get home from seminaries in Jewish settlements in and near Hebron when they went missing.
The kidnapping and murder of 3 children and the bBC makes a political statement out of them. Strange it never does the same when Muslims rape white Christians, murder white Christians, or even as seen in Syria over the weekend crucify fellow muslims:
http://the-eyeontheworld.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/isis-crucify-8-men-inside-syria.html
Nah to the bBC, Blood thirsty Muslims can only be victims.
The bBC, the propaganda mouthpiece for blood thirsty Islam.
For now I can only feel an overwhelming sense of sadness.
Words have, for once, failed me.
Oh look, while the bbC is crying out for those blood thirsty Muslims who are protesting agaisnt the nasty jews for having found 3 of their children murdered. They don’t report this news story about how the ambulance carrying the bodies of those 3 boys was attacked by…peaceful Muslims:
Could we not put this down to incompetence and BBC fact checking? News doesn’t happen until reported in the Guardian.
For Hamas-supporting Beeboids:-
1.) “Bodies of Three Jewish Kidnapped Teens Found Murdered Near Hebron.”
http://pamelageller.com/2014/06/dead-bodies-three-jewish-kidnapped-teens-found-near-hebron.html/
2.) “Exposing Hamas’ kidnapping strategy”
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/163921/sec_id/163921