Bird’s-Eye: Bringing the war back home, indeed. This week, Rabbi Michael Lerner’s house was vandalized by Jews who don’t agree with his political views. Richard Silverstein looks at the politics surrounding that, while your editor offers a personal reaction based on his family history. In the hottest Middle East related piece on the net this week, Mearsheimer divides Jews into two parts and anatomizes them, and in Europe Jewish leaders protest Israeli actions.

* Dershowitz’ Climate of Incitement: Pro-Israel Hooligans Vandalize Michael Lerner’s Home Richard Silverstein Tikun Olam

Here are some of the salient passages of Dershowitz’ recent rave, which denounced a group of rabbis, including Lerner, … Note the terms of incitement therein and think how they might impact the type of deranged, violent mind that carried out the mini-pogrom at Lerner’s home:

A group of rabbis, many of whom have long records of anti-Israel activism, authored a “Rabbinic letter” to Goldstone congratulating him on his grandson’s bar mitzvah and using the occasion to make virulently anti-Israel claims, including the blood libel that Israel deliberately targeted innocent Palestinian civilians without any military purpose. These ignorant rabbis…

These bigoted rabbis…

…The worst of these rabbis (and that’s saying a lot), Michael Lerner, after attempting to politicize the bar mitzvah by offering his anti-Israel synagogue for the event, has decided to honor Richard Goldstone with Tikkun Magazine’s “Ethics Award.” I guess all it takes to be honored by Tikkun is to pass Lerner’s litmus test of lying about Israel. That’s Lerner’s definition of “ethics.”

* Adolf Hitler, Michael Lerner, and I Peter Marmorek Tikkun Daily Blog

This is a story I have always known, a story I grew up with. It is the story of how in Germany on Kristallnacht, Nov 9th, 1938 the mob which was destroying the houses of all the Jews in Mainz came to the house in which my Jewish grandparents lived. There they were met by Maria, my family’s Catholic cook, who faced the mob and said, “Why are you here? You know these people and you know they have done nothing to harm you.” And the people left the house untouched….

* The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews vs. the New Afrikaners John J. Mearsheimer

The story I will tell is straightforward.  Contrary to the wishes of the Obama administration and most Americans – to include many American Jews – Israel is not going to allow the Palestinians to have a viable state of their own in Gaza and the West Bank.  Regrettably, the two-state solution is now a fantasy.  Instead, those territories will be incorporated into a “Greater Israel,” which will be an apartheid state bearing a marked resemblance to white-ruled South Africa.  Nevertheless, a Jewish apartheid state is not politically viable over the long term.  In the end, it will become a democratic bi-national state, whose politics will be dominated by its Palestinian citizens.  In other words, it will cease being a Jewish state, which will mean the end of the Zionist dream.

Let me explain how I reached these conclusions.

* Unconditional support for Israel ‘is dangerous’, say leading European Jews The Guardian

More than 3,000 European Jews, including prominent intellectuals, have signed a petition speaking out against Israeli settlement policies and warning that systematic support for the Israeli government is dangerous. The petition’s signatories include French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a Greens leader in the European Parliament…. They say they hope to build a European movement that is both “committed to the state of Israel and critical of the current choices of its government”.