MEMO 335

Jason Bradbury and Pollyanna Woodward head to Israel, where they test two of the latest underwater cameras in the Red Sea.

Jason concocts a leek smoothie while trying out juicers and fries an egg on the world's brightest battery-powered torch, and the pair drive a buggy at night with its lights off to compare three high-intensity torches.
But the main purpose of their trip is a visit to Israel's annual Kinnernet networking event for technology enthusiasts - to which Jason takes his powered kiteboard. Will it be a triumph or a miserable failure?
The programme also features a guide on how to power a mobile phone using water.

"You may remember Gaby and Tikwah Lock from a terrific and revealing Wonderland film about Hasidic weddings last year.
As unorthodox as an Orthodox Jewish couple from Stamford Hill could be, they have been married for 40 years but — until last October — had never been on holiday.

Paddy Wivell, who made the first film, follows the pair on a Mediterranean cruise that as well as the standard swimming pools, casinos and day trips boasts religious lectures and relationship workshops that aim to bring back the sparkle to a marriage. For the Locks, the cruise gives them the chance to discuss the collection of used light bulbs that Gaby has always refused to throw out.
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This time, the pair invite cameras to follow them as they embark on a 12-day kosher cruise of the Mediterranean on the Golden Iris, which boasts religious lectures and relationship workshops alongside the usual fare of Jacuzzi sessions and light entertainment."

"The film depicts the inside of a tank, and the view from inside through the gunsight (every change in the horizontal and vertical viewing direction is accompanied by the hydraulic whine of the traversing gun turret).
The film is set during the 1982 Lebanon war.

There are four Israeli soldiers inside: the driver in the tank's hull, the loader, the gunner and the commander in the turret. Part of the time, there is also the body of a dead Israeli soldier (kept there until it is taken away by helicopter), a Syrian POW, a visiting higher officer, and a visiting Phalangist (Lebanese Maronite Catholic allied with Israel) who threatens the POW.

The duty of the soldiers is to clear a Lebanese area from Lebanese citizens. They are instructed to use phosphorus grenades that are forbidden by international treaty, but to use a code word for them, to conceal their use.

The gunner has never fired the tank's cannon in a war situation, and is hesitant at first. As a result, a fellow Israeli soldier is killed. The soldiers have to cope with the deteriorating state of the tank, the heat, bad atmosphere and small space inside, occasional failure of the communication equipment, navigational problems, and mutual quarrels."

"Len make preparations for a highly sensitive military operation against the Irgun, but their secret plans are betrayed, with appalling consequences for him and his men."

Writing in The Independent, novelist Howard Jacobson said that in The Promise "Just about every Palestinian was sympathetic to look at, just about every Jew was not. While most Palestinians might fairly be depicted as living in poor circumstances, most Israeli Jews might not be fairly depicted as living in great wealth... Though I, too, have found Palestinians to be people of immense charm, I could only laugh in derision at The Promise every time another shot of soft-eyed Palestinians followed another shot of hard-faced Jews." In an interview with Jacobson during Jewish Book Week 2011, Jonathan Freedland, having seen the first episode of The Promise, said Kosminsky used antisemitic tropes, misrepresenting Israel and Zionism as being a consequence of the Holocaust, whose imagery he had abused. Historian, Professor David Cesarani, accused Kosminsky of "deceit...massive historical distortion": omitting the Balfour Declaration's promise of a Jewish national home; downplaying selfish British geo-strategy; and exculpating the British, "chief architects of the Palestine tragedy...making responsible...only the Jews"; turning a tricorn conflict of British, Arabs and Jews "into a one-sided rant."