Last Saturday on West Morgan Street, the collective pressure of a surging crowd of students, alumni and visitors from West Point were crushing me between the club’s brick wall and the off-duty cop’s bicep (a rock and a hard place?). In my asphyxiated state, I asked the security guard, and I paraphrase, “Why don’t you guys indicate where people should line up with, like, a rope or something? This is a safety issue.” According to him, he’s been telling Shooters’ management to do so for two years, but to no avail.
From what I can deduce of said management, they have other priorities—for example, dental hygiene. An anecdote: I spotted one man who works there standing on the bar, holding a clear drink in his hand. He takes out his dentures, deposits them into his drink, takes a sip, then PUTS HIS DENTURES BACK IN. If you’re 21, I suggest ordering that at the bar sometime.
Saturday night’s debacle illustrates, on its most simplistic level, the potentially disastrous effects of factional tensions. You would assume that two parties responsible for running one business would have overlapping concerns. Yet, the heaving crowd will make it into Shooters eventually, handing over their five dollars and joining in the debauchery. Security is concerned about our safety, but management’s top priority is the bottom line.
You might not think that I can construct an argument about factions within organizations by using Shooters and Israeli domestic politics as my two examples... we’ll see if it works.
Although governments have different responsibilities than businesses, they face the same issues inherent to factionalism. We can (and do) blame the entire “Shooters” entity for its faults, and we do the same with countries like Israel. The recent analysis about the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian peace talks lacks an understanding of how Israeli domestic politics are affected by problems of faction.
Commentators on the process often blame all of Israel’s government, just like we blame “Shooters” for problems that could be streamlined. In both instances, rather than blaming the people trying to work together, we need to recognize the problems that continually conspire to divide them. Indeed, the Sept. 26 expiration of the moratorium on settlement construction in the West Bank, just one example of these many problems, sparked the most recent commotion.
Background comparison: in the United States, we have a winner-take-all system. That means that if you win your district, you get to be a congressman. And it’s the same with state races. Similarly, Obama had to win a majority of the Electoral College to become president (and what a fun job that has been). Americans like our seemingly simpler system: it’s easy to count to two. If something like the, uh, economy, is not working well, the American people blame the majority party (hello, Midterms 2010).
Most countries don’t operate this way. Case in point: Israel. It’s basically impossible for any one party to gain a majority based on proportional representation. If you look at the list of parties in the Knesset (parliament), there are five with significant numbers of seats. To form a coalition, the prime minister has to bring in diverse groups with usually contradictory interests.
Here’s the deal: I’m not going to indict any one group. Columnists who do that receive anthrax via post, and I like sophomore year so far. The point I want to make is that the settlement-construction issue is a deal breaker for these peace talks.
Although it has defined the news coverage so far, it’s only the tip of the iceberg.
There are even tougher issues to resolve, such as the status of Jerusalem, the division of the West Bank, the right of return, the participants in the talks and the identity of the two states. Yet, for certain religiously affiliated parties in Israel, the end of settlement construction will mean the end of their participation in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition.
Here, we reach an impasse in which factionalism is the be-all-end-all blocking the solution. Not to deny that negotiations must and hopefully will continue, but you can’t negotiate without a government. Coalitions are messy, inefficient and sometimes infuriating. It’s hard to find solutions that satisfy not only the smaller domestic parties but also the Palestinian Authority. Toss Hamas, which is against holding direct talks, into the mix and you get the largest migraine a diplomat could have.
I don’t have a prescription for the madness. (I did for Shooters…but then again, why have lines when you can have mosh pits?). But before we attempt to analyze the Israelis’ situation from afar, we need to understand the motivations of all parties involved, including Likud, Kadima, Yisrael Beitanu, Avoda and Shas.
Samantha Lachman is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs every other Thursday.
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