Beside the Sickle Moon: A Palestinian Story

Beside the Sickle Moon is near future literary activism based on Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The story tells a first person narrative through Laeth Awad, a Palestinian who lives above his convenience store experiencing days pass through smoke clouds with his cousin Aylul. One night upon returning to their village from Ramallah they encounter an Israeli checkpoint within the buffer zone that hadn’t been there before. It isn’t long until the two stumble upon Israel’s plans to construct a luxury hotel for incoming settlers, Ma’al Luz. Demolition crews and military personnel are due to fulfill this contract in the months to come and with them as overseer is the infamous Meir Cohen, a Mossad operative who played a key role in the fall of Gaza.

Aylul believes from their father, an Al Qassam militant who died in the battle for Jericho, that only the threat of annihilation breeds the best of human action. They use their contacts to connect with the factions, who grant them strength to defend their village from occupation. With these resources in hand Aylul forms Al Mubarizun, a group crowning themselves Palestine’s final resistance.

Laeth doubts the existence of a future, lost in philosophical ambivalence as he tries to follow his cousin into the depths of guerrilla warfare. He questions the futility of resistance when all former allies have normalized relations with Israel. And what of the innocents on the other side of the Wall who had no say in where they were born? Though a minority of the population, he is not alone in this sentiment. Palestinian youth begin to empathize with this logic enough to create a new social movement, the Forgotten Ones. Coining the derogatory term that their critics slung, the NGO advocates for a peaceful transition to Israel’s colonization where most Palestinians hear whimpers of surrender.

Set in a hauntingly plausible future, where Israel has marked a century of Palestinian occupation … As a novel of the future, Beside the Sickle Moon is, unsurprisingly, preoccupied with temporality, attempting to reconcile the vastness of macro-historical events with the immediacy of everyday life. … One of the most chilling features of Husien’s novel as history is the world’s renewed abandonment of Palestine. In a future of systemic global crisis, nations have closed ranks and shut their eyes. Israeli mines run on the slave labor of Palestinian captives, and refugee camps have become invisibilized death zones … — Londiwe Gamedze https://africasacountry.com/2024/11/reading-the-present-as-history

ISBN Print: 9781998309290
Publication Date: September 2024
Page Count: 180
Binding Type: Soft cover
Trim Size: 6in x 9in
Language: English
Colour: B&W

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THAER HUSIEN is a Palestinian educator living on Turtle Island. He is a co-founder of The Posterity Alliance, a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer based in the Republic of Georgia, a Fulbright scholar in Amman, Jordan, and holds an MFA in…

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    1-5 of 2 reviews

    • Saiyare Refaei interviews Thaer Husien

      Saiyare Refaei interviews Thaer Husien at https://justseeds.org/beside-the-sickle-moon-interview-with-author-thaer-husein/

      Saiyare: If it’s ok, I’m going to read a small excerpt from your book that I keep going back to where your protagonist Laeth describes an encounter with who we presume to be an Israeli soldier, (on page 53,) “Part of me wants to struggle against his grip; maybe dig a finger into the hole of his simply made Stim, but there’s also a gun against my head. Any Palestinian would feel at home in this disposition, I’m sure of it. It’s a feeling closer to home than the land we’ve retained. I’d wager every shekel that any of them would use these last moments to spit in his porcelain face, but instead, I laugh.” I come back to this line because I think of such shining examples like the dearly revered poet and scholar Refaat Alareer, who would have turned 45 today, used humor in the face of such stark moments of despair. And I’m wondering what kind of tools such as humor, writing, art means to you in this struggle and fight for liberation?

      Thaer: Ironically, I think that humor in particular is essential in order to keep us keeping on and remember our humanity. I say it’s a little ironic because I’m not really the funniest person anymore. I struggle often almost on a daily basis with remembering that things like humor and love are essential aspects to anything that would call itself the process of revolution, and it’s not just about rage and sorrow. That those are the tools to our humanity when we forget them. And I tried to apply that in the novel itself.

      September 24, 2024
    • Londiwe Gamedze

      Set in a hauntingly plausible future, where Israel has marked a century of Palestinian occupation … As a novel of the future, Beside the Sickle Moon is, unsurprisingly, preoccupied with temporality, attempting to reconcile the vastness of macro-historical events with the immediacy of everyday life. … One of the most chilling features of Husien’s novel as history is the world’s renewed abandonment of Palestine. In a future of systemic global crisis, nations have closed ranks and shut their eyes. Israeli mines run on the slave labor of Palestinian captives, and refugee camps have become invisibilized death zones … — Londiwe Gamedze https://africasacountry.com/2024/11/reading-the-present-as-history

      November 25, 2024

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