We live in a world saturated by the manifestation of evil. Genesis tells the origin story. The story starts with Adam succumbing to the temptation of desire for the forbidden. The Creator surely knew the decision to allow freedom of will would produce evil. Every succeeding generation has had to live with the consequences of that decision.
Within each generation Adam and Eve's descendants have succumbed to the grip of evil. Wise men and women have warned us to beware of the destructiveness of choosing that path. Still, humankind bites that apple.
The Catholic News Service's Courtney Grogan reported the latest bite:
The U.S. State Department announced Monday it will close the Palestinian Liberation Organization office in Washington because it says Palestine has failed to take "steps to advance the start of direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel".
The Palestinian Liberation Organization, or PLO, is recognized by the United Nations as "the representative of the Palestinian people" and has diplomatic relationship with over 100 states, including the Holy See.
Closing the Washington PLO office was petty, mean-spirited and pointless. It is also just the latest evil step by the Trump administration to join with Israel to destroy the Palestinian peoples' essential humanity. It won't work.
Tyrants and nations have the ability to destroy an immediate target but they cannot eradicate the will of a people to survive as a people.
The Jewish people know this. They lost six million Jews in Europe. In time, their oppressors lost a war, and now the Jews have their own nation. It is a nation built on a desire for a homeland.
That is an understandable desire, but when it is built on land that belongs to others, it arrives saturated with evil.
There is no other way to describe the results of that journey from the Garden to Palestine. It is yet another power grab of land which arrived in America on ships bearing white colonialists who brought a dream of freedom and created a nation on land that was already inhabited by others.
We descendants of those white colonialists compounded that evil by using other boats carrying Africans, kidnapped from their homelands and degraded into slavery.
Fast forward to the presidency of Donald Trump in which the farce called the "peace process" enters a new phase. Under Trump there is no pretense that process is neutral after he named three radical Zionists to manage the U.S. role in continuing the "peace process".
The three Orthodox American Jews are U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, Jason Greenblatt, and Jared Kushner.
Friedman is the U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Greenblatt was the executive vice president and chief legal officer to Trump and the Trump organization and his advisor on Israel. He is an Assistant to the President and Special Representative for International Negotiations.
Kushner is Trump's son-in-law.
This trio's most recent attack was the aforementioned closure of the PLO office in Washington. This petty action was more symbolic than damaging. Washington is filled with foreign embassies willing to offer a computer and a desk to the PLO.
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