LONDON: Jewish pressure groups are calling on a publisher to withdraw a children’s book about a Palestinian boy growing up amid the intifada on the West Bank. A Little Piece of Ground, by the multi-award-winning author Elizabeth Laird, is a fictional account of how a 12-year-old called Karim — whose family’s olive groves have been confiscated by settlers — copes when his father is stripped and humiliated by Israeli troops.

As the boy is swept up in the protest against the occupation, and his friends make a fake bomb, he dreams of developing an “acid formula to dissolve the steel in Israeli tanks”.

The publisher, Macmillan, has received three demands for the book to be pulped, and many bookshops are worried about stocking it, lest it provoke further protests from Jewish groups. So far, most of the attacks on Laird have come from North America, led by a chain of Canadian bookshops which made the first “vitriolic” complaint to her publisher. Others have come from within the industry.

The New Zealand-born novelist wrote her book after visiting Ramallah as part of a British Council scheme to encourage writing for children. She denies the story is anti-Israeli.

“I did expect comeback, but to say that any criticism of Israel is anti-semitic is doing Israel a disservice. This is an important story that should be told. It shows a child under military occupation. It’s terrible for the occupiers, and terrible for the occupied. I hope I have shown how awful it is for the soldiers too,” said Laird, who has lived in Beirut and Iraq.

“There is already a great deal of understanding of Israel. All western people have felt sympathetic to Israel, for good reason often; and I don’t think that should stop. The voice of the Palestinian child, on the other hand, has not been heard.”

Laird, who has won the Children’s Book Award, the Smarties Prize and been nominated three times for the Carnegie Medal (for children’s fiction), claimed A Little Piece of Ground was not meant to explain politics. “...the book is written through the eyes of a 12-year-old who just sees men with guns. It would not have been true to my characters to do otherwise. The book is not so much about politics as about brothers, friendship, falling in love and football.”

The title comes from a scrap of waste land that Karim and his friends turn into a football pitch and which later becomes a flashpoint in the violence.

Laird insisted that everything in the book was drawn from real events. “A lot of the incidents have come from the main Israeli human rights website”, while others were taken from the experiences of her collaborator, Sonia Nimir, a lecturer at Bir Zeit University on the West Bank. Laird said she “toned down” several parts of the book, but that the motivation for suicide bombing had to be tackled.

Britain’s children’s laureate, Michael Morpurgo, has defended the novel. “Sometimes we need more than escapism. No one but Elizabeth Laird could have written this book. She has lived in the Middle East. She knows it, loves it, grieves for it, and hopes for it.”

He urged parents to encourage their 11- to 14-year-olds to buy it. “Read it, and we know what it is to feel oppressed, to feel fear every day. And we should know it, and our children should know it, for this is how much of the world lives,” he said.

Macmillan refused to discuss where the demands to pull the book had come from, but Kate Wilson, managing director of its children’s publishing arm, said the firm had no intention of withdrawing it. “We thought long and hard about whether it was responsible to go ahead. We were aware it might provoke a range of opinions.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.