Occupation, shmoccupation! A defiant settler comic declares Israel isn’t occupying the West Bank

"Occupation Schmuccupation," a new comic book aimed at Israeli high school students has a light-hearted title. It's topic — not so much.

It takes on issues like who has a legitimate claim to the West Bank and whether Israel works to improve the lives of Palestinians. Critics in Israel have called the pamphlet, "The idiot's guide to whitewashing the occupation."

Settlers reject the characterization.

"These booklets are not aimed to spread hate," says Miri Ovadia, who lives in a West Bank settler community called Neve Tzuf. "They're aimed to show the reality as it is. It's true that it touches issues that are very complicated, because the reality is complicated."

Ovadia is a spokeswoman for the Yesha Council, the governing body for Jewish settlements and the group that produced the booklet. Yesha is an acronym for Judea and Samaria, the biblical names for the West Bank.

The booklet's cover features a paintbrush resting on a map of what Ovadia calls "greater Israel."

"There is almost half a million Israelis who live in Judea and Samaria, religious, secular, ultra-orthodox," she says. "These are people who really this is their home."

Ovadia says the comic conveys one essential truth: Israel is not occupying the West Bank.

And it's that telling of history that has inflamed tensions.

Especially at this moment, when so-called "price tag" attacks — violence designed to "exact a price" from Palestinians or even from Israeli security forces for anti-settler actions — are on the rise.

This summer someone, police say it was Jewish settlers, set fire to a Palestinian family's home.

The fire took the lives of a father, mother and their toddler; a 4-year-old boy was orphaned.

Critics of the booklet say a mass produced booklet for kids that sweeps aside Palestinian claims to the West Bank is an especially bad idea in the current environment.

Ovadia disagrees.

"The idea of this booklet is to say let's change the dialogue, let's change the terms, put aside terms like occupation, borders and wars," she says. "The idea is to change stigmas that have to do with the occupation."

Tens of thousands of copies of Occupation Schmuccupation have already been ordered.

They're being delivered to universities, schools and community centers across the country.

Occupation: A comic booklet by PRI's The World