THERE are 22 days to go before 2020 is brought to a close, not with a bang but a whimper.
Yes, it is never too early to look back at a year that wasn't for much of humanity. Like T.S. Eliot's Hollow Men, 2020 has been, thus far, a year of "shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion". Covid-19 has pummelled a year out of our lives.
Well, almost. But not for Zionist Israel. The terrible combo of United States President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have made sure of this. What a good year it has been for the Zionists. Call it an annus mirabilis, not without a caveat though (neither land nor time affords an everlasting "mirabilis" when either is stolen from another).
Full diplomatic and commercial relations between Arab states and Israel, both unthinkable mere months ago. The United Arab Emirates has signed a deal that allows its companies to import olive oil and wine produced by companies illegally settled on occupied Palestinian land.
This is surely a concession too far. And an unspeakable thing has happened as well: Saudi Arabia has even allowed Israeli planes to fly through its airspace. What else is happening on the quiet is anybody's guess.
Never has a Palestinian Caesar seen so many Brutus, all in the span of 343 days. True, Palestinian lives have been so numbered. "Et tu, Brute" still echoes the length and breadth of Palestine, occupied or otherwise. Yes, you too, brother?
And the impunity of the Zionist regime is growing by the day. The latest is the brutal assassination of Iran's top scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, in Absard, some 80km from capital city Teheran.
This and other killings are making obvious what lay buried for long: the commerce-and-crime partnership of Netanyahu and Trump. Every criminal leaves behind a clue or two. So have Netanyahu and Trump.
Targeted killing is what the Zionist regime has been doing for a long time. The late Winston Churchill, though a Zionist-friendly British prime minister, did not mince his words when his resident minister in the Middle East, Lord Moyne, was gunned down in front of his home in Cairo, Egypt, in 1944 by Lehi, a Zionist movement.
Churchill had this to say about the killers of his friend and political ally: "If there is to be any hope of a peaceful and successful future for Zionism, these wicked activities must cease, and those responsible for them must be destroyed root and branch." Jeremy Salt, the author of The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands, writing in the Palestine Chronicle, says the root and branch are still there.
We agree. What's worse, though the root is in Tel Aviv, the branch has reached Washington. Targeted killing is now US foreign policy. Evidence? Drone killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in time of peace. Salt issues this warning: "No state can endlessly endure Israel's provocations.
At some point, there will be a limit to what they can endure and then there will be war, possibly if not probably, the most devastating in the modern history of the Middle East." Netanyahu and Trump, like Francis Fukuyama, may think that history has come to an end and, therefore, the Palestinian question can be ignored.
Not so quickly. What is coming to an end is only the year that wasn't.