The Curse of the Mudball Boy

Mazen Marouf

The last living Palestinian children on Earth become a spectacle in a glass box that tours schools in Israeli kibbutzim. The children watch him curiously, as if he were an alien.
In this short novel, the Palestinian writer and poet resorts to science fiction to simulate the long Palestinian tragedy. We are in the future. Palestinians have begun to call themselves "the philosophers," as another Israeli measure to obliterate and erase their history. They were expelled from Tel Aviv, Haifa, Acre, and the Galilee to the south. The settlements in Beersheba were also evacuated. In 2037, a biological missile will be launched on the south of the country, hunting down the philosophers wherever they are. There is only one child who managed to survive, with tremendous immunity derived from the bodies of the murdered Palestinians.
With the naive flow of a children's story, the superboy tells us this amazing surreal story, which plays with violent historical events and presents us with chapters from the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through imaginary and satirical characters and events that contain all the dark and terrifying features of reality.