U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s muscular and passionate speech at the State Department yesterday about the need to perpetuate the long-standing U.S. support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has presented the incoming Trump administration with a stark challenge.

Kerry deftly defended the U.S. decision not to veto a U.N. resolution calling for an end to Israeli West Bank settlements while reaffirming the U.S. unqualified support for Israel, including particularly that of the Obama administration to provide a qualitative advance to Israeli security with the implementation of its “Iron Dome” anti-missile defense system.

But Kerry acknowledged that the leadership under current Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is the most right-wing in Israeli history and in its strident opposition to the two state solution, is now appealing to the incoming Trump administration to join them in this.

OK, reality check time. We’re just learning how deep and long-term the Russian infiltration of the U.S. social fabric has been since the 1970s, always in support of so-called “alt right” white racist and virulently anti-Semitic cults, aimed at destabilizing and weakening the cornerstones of American democratic institutions.

They’ve been doing the same all over the globe. So far, the rest of the world has been asleep at the wheel. The egregious excess of this influence in the November presidential election, going so far as to elect a Russian asset to the White House, has begun to awaken some, at least, to this anti-democratic and imperialistic danger.

The bugs placed in the ears of so many around the world by Russia, all advocating for the kind of racist separatism that is now roiling Europe after it inspired the Brexit vote in England last summer and Trump’s election last month. Russia helped this along with its murderous military interventions in Syria, driving millions of refugees into Europe to incite a racist backlash there, and they’ve undoubtedly aided and abetted acts of terrorism in the name of ISIS or other groups.

Now, right wing elements have ascended in Israel and are agitating for undermining peace in that region. But in exchange for what? As Kerry stressed in his speech yesterday, there will be no peace without a two-state solution, and that requires stepping up peace negotiations there made possible by growing trust, despite all the inherent difficulties with that.

The alternative to peace is war. The right-wing mentality that is driving the current one-state solution in Israel has only one vision of an eventual outcome: Armageddon. But realistically, this wild fantasy would, in the realities of the world we now live in, undoubtedly involve the complete and total destruction of Israel as, shall we say, an “unintended consequence.”

Would Putin mind if this happened? What do you think?

So Putin’s U.S. president-elect is now threatening to align with the right wing Israeli faction resolved to undermine chances for peace and to hurry the day when this Armageddon arrives, and of course, this will enjoy the gleeful support of hypocritical American right wing evangelical sycophants.

For life itself to continue on this lonely orb spinning in space, the potential represented by the evolving human race harbors to key to its success, but also the dangerous potential for its failure.

Blinded by hate, ideology and fear, otherwise civilized humans in the last year have either advocated or tolerated a huge escalation of the divisions among us that threaten planetary life itself. It is critical that reasonable people step up and begin to act with passion against this.

The top page one headline in the Christmas Day edition of the Washington Post on Sunday was unintentionally prophetic. It read, “Trump Plans to Dissolve Charity.”

The story was about Trump’s intention to shutter his non-profit foundation, although the New York attorney general’s office says it won’t allow that pending the completion of its ongoing investigation. But at Christmastime, readings from the King James Bible remind us that the word “charity” is also the word for “love.”

So, “Trump Plans to Dissolve Love” can be an alternative reading of that headline. That is not news, but being signaled on Christmas Day, however, should give us all pause.