Gilligan's Island and the Arab-Israel Conflict
Gilligan's Island and the Arab-Israel Conflict

 

I can still remember racing home from the local Jewish Day School in time to grab a snack, plop myself in front of the TV, and tune into to channel 44 just as that well know opening theme song came on.

Here's the story of a lovely lady,
Who was bringing up three very lovely girls.
All of them had hair of gold, like their mother,
The youngest one in curls.

Here's the story, of a man named Brady,
Who was busy with three boys of his own.
They were four men, living all together,
Yet they were all alone.

Till the one day when the lady met this fellow,
And they knew that it was much more than a hunch.
That this group would somehow form a family.
That's the way we all became the Brady Bunch.

As the theme song ended and before the show started I can still recall the final opening credit: 'Created by Sherwood Schwartz'. I thought nothing of it at the time, but when I read about his passing, at the age of 94, earlier this month, I was saddened because Sherwood Schwartz had provided me, and certainly countless of others, hours upon hours of enjoyable entertainment, life lessons and many corny jokes too.

The Brady Bunch ran from 1969-1974 on ABC and was subsequently syndicated internationally. The shows I watched as a kid in the early 1980's were reruns, but I didn't care. More often than not the conflicts in the Brady household centered on: Gender issues (Boy vs. Girl or Male vs. Female, like who was the better driver, Greg or Marcia), Old vs. Young: Kids against parents, younger kids against older kids, or Big Head Syndrome: When one character gets an inflated ego and thus drives the family crazy until a big ego crash brings them back to Earth.

As a boy, I always took the boy's side on the show. I hoped Greg, Peter, and Bobby, would best Marcia, Jan, and Cindy, but it never seemed to work out that way on The Brady Bunch. Inevitably the kids would learn a valuable lesson from their parents, Mike and Carol, with some comic relief provided by their housekeeper, Alice

Sometimes the conflicts revolved around 'territory', like when Greg and Marcia both want a room in the attic. In another episode, The Brady kids bicker about personal space issues, flaring an all-out battle punching and yelling at each other, just like regular brothers and sisters. Marcia then attempts to move herself and her sisters into the backyard clubhouse. Then, fearing the impending loss of the male sanctuary, Greg and his brothers block their new siblings with a so-unfair gender discrimination policy. The girls picket.

Perhaps a parallel could be drawn between the Bradys and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Brady's hotly contested attic could be Jerusalem; the boy's clubhouse might be dubbed 'disputed' territory.

One of the episodes I remember most clearly was the one where the Brady kids are collecting trading stamps but the company is going to stop making them. The trading stamp store decides to close its doors and the siblings have to move quickly to cash in their sticky vouchers -- or lose out on all the cool stamp store merchandise. Separately the boys and girls stamps can't acquire much, so they decide to combine their stamps and either buy a rowboat, which is the boy's choice, or what the girl's want, a sewing machine (remember, this aired in the early 1970's). The argument over what to buy escalates until dad weighs in with a level-headed solution -- build a house of cards. Greg and Marcia lead their respective teams in building a house out of playing cards. With one card added at a time, whoever causes the house to collapse gives up their stamps. The girls win, and the boys are bummed out that they won't get their rowboat. The surprise ending involves the girls returning from the store announcing that they have acquired something groovy that the whole family can enjoy, a color television set. And they lived happily ever after.

With the Bradys, things always worked out in the end. In fact, since all conflicts were resolved amicably on The Brady Bunch by the end of the half-hour episode, it's hard to draw any parallels with the political conflicts we read about in our local headlines today. If anything, we Israelis should see the Brady Bunch as an ideal model for living together in Israel. Jews of all walks of life are thrown together under one roof, in a 'bunch', in one county they call home, Israel, and we hope we can work out all our conflicts with a little compromise - and some corny one-liners too.

But in fact, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict much more closely resembles another classic Sherwood Schwartz TV creation with a much more diverse cast of characters, Gilligan's Island (CBS 1964-67). According to the show's popular theme song, which Schwartz also wrote, Gilligan, the Skipper, and five passengers (the millionaire and his wife, the movie star, The Professor and Mary Ann) set sail one day for a three hour tour and end up marooned on an uncharted desert isle.

Of course the castaways have their conflicts. In one episode they build a hut for all, but tensions mount and soon they all build their own huts. In another, the women tire of being held subservient to the men and decide to separate and build their own camp. The men realize how much they need the women, and so they try to scare the women back. In a political episode, when Mr. Howell and the Skipper square off over who is in charge, the castaways decide they need to elect a leader.

But the most recurring theme is that Gilligan, as usual, messes up any rescue attempts. The creators of the show knew full well that the moment the castaways get rescued from the island, the show is over, so the plots always end up with the seven hapless Castaways still stranded on Gilligan's Island.

The main question one should ask about the show, (besides why The Howell's brought so many clothes aboard a boat for a 3 hour tour and how the professor can be so smart that he can build a radio out of a coconut, but can't devise a foolproof way to get them off the island), is why does Gilligan keep messing up any rescue attempts?

The truth must lie in that Gilligan really likes life on the island and wants to stay there.

While the Israelis encourage the Palestinians to return to the negotiation table to seek a solution, or a way 'to get off the island', if you will, the Palestinians don't seem to have a willingness to cooperate. Up till now they have, a la Gilligan, seemed quite content to 'stay on the island' or to sabotage any negotiations or exit scheme plans. They have now set their sites on the UN instead. To me, the UN seems like every guest star that found their way onto Gilligan's island, and there were a lot of them (the castaways hosted everyone from a Beatles type band named 'The Mosquitos' to the Harlem Globetrotters).

But of all those guest stars who visited the island with promises of rescuing the castaways, none came through. Only when the castaways worked together as a group did they succeed at anything (except getting rescued, of course). The castaways don't seem to learn that they can't rely on outsiders to 'rescue' them; they need to work out their problems with the people that share their piece of land.

As for the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, perhaps Sherwood Schwartz summed it up best in the second part of the theme song that ran with the show's closing credits:

So this is the tale of the castaways,
They're here for a long, long time,
They'll have to make the best of things,
It's an uphill climb.