Prospect of peace slipping away once again
posted by Charles GelmanAt TPMCafe, Daniel Levy reviews the Obama administration’s efforts to-date in confronting the Israel-Palestine conflict:
This was not a good week for the Obama administration’s Middle East peace efforts. Speaking alongside Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in Jerusalem last Saturday, Secretary Clinton seemed to be praising the distinctively partial limitations that Israel was willing to implement on settlement non-expansion. During the following days in Morocco and Cairo, she walked those remarks back, but the damage had been done.
By Thursday, the American-sponsored Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was sufficiently exasperated to announce that he will not be standing for re-election, and all week the media and political commentary on the U.S. approach was scathing about America’s efforts—even by Middle East standards.
Speaking to the Washington Post, I described the U.S. approach of the past days as amateurish—a perhaps harsh, but unfortunately apt, label. On the positive side, I think the administration folks are themselves aware that this is not going swimmingly. The overall administration scorecard on Middle East peace is slipping into the red.
Continue reading at TPMCafe.
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Social Science Research Council


Kierkegaard was a dissembler and a clown. He had a Christ complex and a club foot. He looked great in an overcoat with a turned-up collar. Much of his adult life was spent mentally obsessing over a woman. Catullus had his Lesbia. Dante had his Beatrice. Petrarch had his Laura. Kierkegaard had his Regine. She appears in some form or another in all of his writing. The reader can be forgiven for not recognizing Regine as Isaac in the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, but that’s the way Kierkegaard saw her.
The individual subject, the self-obsessed innovator or artist so dear to much western philosophy, had, therefore, no place for Lévi-Strauss, and indeed repelled him. He saw the glorification of individual creativity as an illusion. As he wrote in Tristes Tropiques: “the I is hateful”. This perspective is particularly evident in his study of Amerindian art. This art did not involve the great individualistic self-displays of western art that he abhorred. The Amerindian artist, by contrast, tried to reproduce what others had done and, if he was innovating, he was unaware of the fact. Throughout Lévi-Strauss’s work there is a clear aesthetic preference for a creativity that is distributed throughout a population and that does not wear its emotions on its sleeve.