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By Susan R. Eisenstein
(OCTOBER 25, 2022 / JNS) The school board of Newark, New Jersey is drawing attention from Israel advocacy and education organizations as well as parents for adding an anti-Israel book to its mandatory curriculum.
The book A Little Piece of Ground by Elizabeth Laird was included in the sixth-grade English curriculum for the 2022-23 school year. The book, targeted at young adults, is accused of pushing anti-Israel propaganda and conveying a biased view of Israel to impressionable children.
According to the book’s Amazon description, A Little Piece Of Ground “explores the human cost of the occupation of Palestinian lands through the eyes of a young boy.”
Critics charge that the book portrays Palestinians as victims and Israelis as hostile oppressors.
In letters to the superintendent of the Newark Board of Education, Roger Leon, last month, the Zionist Organization of America demanded that the book be removed from the curriculum.
“The book is filled with misleading anti-Israel statements and outright lies,” wrote ZOA’s National President Morton Klein and Susan Tuchman, Esq., director of the ZOA’s Center for Law and Justice. “Instead of building understanding of a complex subject, fighting prejudice and encouraging tolerance, this book will poison impressionable children—with little if any knowledge about the complicated Middle East conflict—to hate Jews, Israelis and the State of Israel.”
“On the surface, Laird’s book is a story about Karim, a Palestinian Arab child living in Ramallah, a city located in what is commonly referred to as the West Bank. Readers see the world through Karim’s eyes and experiences,” ZOA wrote. “But Laird is clever, repeatedly sending the false and outrageous message to her young readers that Israelis are heartless and cruel, that their goal is to humiliate Palestinian Arabs and make their lives a misery and that Jews are stealing other people’s land.”
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