When sci-fi meets reality: BSG and the Middle East

The end of one of television's best series is nigh; in fact the latter half of the final season started less than two weeks ago. In order to be fully caught up, I decided to rewatch the first three seasons in order to be ready for the fourth and final one. What has repeatedly struck me, though, is how the events of a program on the Sci-Fi Channel can have so much relevance to actual current affairs.

The premise of Battlestar Galactica (BSG) is that, in the future, most of the human race is annihilated after a nuclear attack. The remainders of humanity are fleeing a human-made robot race called the Cylons who want to eliminate the few humans they missed. The series portrays the humans struggle to regroup and find the mythical Earth, where they hope to resettle and rebuild civilization. Now, I know it takes place on spaceships and is on the Sci-Fi Channel but that is about as sci-fi as it gets. What it is actually is an exercise on humanity, desperation and redemption.

I'm not going to go into the details of all the similarities because it would take a bloody long time and because, without having seen the series, I feel it would be hard to see the connections without my writing a full-on essay about it (though I might just do that one day). However, if we look at a list of BSG's over-arching themes, we can see a striking resemblance to the current situation in Israel and Gaza/the West Bank:

• morality of war, and the after-effects of war
• the creation of extremists/extremism
• recovery from disaster/attack
• PTSD/recovery from trauma
• racism
• establishment of government/establishment of a state
• terrorism
• genocide
  
• occupation and oppression
  
• inter-religious conflict, and religion vs. secularism
• religious extremism
• the right of humanity, and dehumanization others
  
• peace vs. war as a solution to conflict
• morality vs. survival in a time of war
• torture and detention
• vengeance and reconciliation

Now, I'm not a huge television watcher so perhaps these themes have appeared on other shows as well, but I think two things make BSG a very interesting juxtaposition of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. One is the specific combination of these themes around the premise of a massacred, displaced people looking to establish a home; and the second is the modality of a television series, which allows these themes to be explored, intertwined, developed, re-approached and analyzed over a longer period of time than, say, a film, in the same way that the 60 years of conflict in Israel and the Territories have seen these themes resurface in different ways over and over again.

Through BSG, we get a more detached way of looking at the elements of the situation in the Middle East, and are allowed to see the same concepts we're living with in a starkly different context. Because of this, we are better able to better understand them and therefore better understand what's happening in reality. It also gives us a different perspective on these issues, one to which we have no personal connection and therefore are able to view more objectively. And if you think I'm just a crazy sci-fi fanboy, might I direct you to IO9's article on BSG and the Obama administration (warning: spoilers abound).

I'm quite sure that the show was never intended to be any kind of allegory for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and some of BSG's prominent themes could probably also be applied to other events as well: the Rwandan and Darfurian genocides, the fall of the Soviet Union, the situations in Tibet and Taiwan regarding China, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and many other situations. Having not studied any of those events in great detail, I cannot say if they are a better or worse fit.

But as someone living in the middle of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict I can say that there is definitely more than a tenuous connection to the current situation and that of the struggle between the Colonial Fleet and the Cylons (and I'm not the only one). In that light, BSG should be watched as a manifestation of these same critical issues and as a treatise on how humans deal with extremes: physical, political, religious and moral, among others.

But even aside from all that: it's just damn good television.