Secret memo shows Israel knew Six Day War was illegal
Saturday, 26 May 2007
A senior legal official who secretly warned the government of Israel after the
Six Day War of 1967 that it would be illegal to build Jewish settlements in the
occupied Palestinian territories has said, for the first time, that he still
believes that he was right.
The declaration by Theodor Meron, the Israeli Foreign Ministry's legal adviser
at the time and today one of the world's leading international jurists, is a
serious blow to Israel's persistent argument that the settlements do not violate
international law, particularly as Israel prepares to commemorate the 40th
anniversary of the war in June 1967.
The legal opinion, a copy of which has been obtained by The Independent, was
marked "Top Secret" and "Extremely Urgent" and reached the unequivocal
conclusion, in the words of its author's summary, "that civilian settlement in
the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth
Geneva Convention."
Judge Meron, president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia until 2005, said that, after 40 years of Jewish settlement growth in
the West Bank - one of the main problems to be solved in any peace deal: "I
believe that I would have given the same opinion today."
Judge Meron, a holocaust survivor, also sheds new light on the aftermath of the
1967 war by disclosing that the Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, was "sympathetic"
to his view that civilian settlement would directly conflict with the Hague and
Geneva conventions governing the conduct of occupying powers.
Despite the legal opinion, which was forwarded to Levi Eshkol, the Prime
Minister, but not made public at the time, the Labour cabinet progressively
sanctioned settlements. This paved the way to growth which has resulted in at
least 240,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank today.
Judge Meron, 76, is now an appeal judge at the Tribunal. Speaking about his 1967
opinion for the first time, he also tells tomorrow's Independent Magazine: "It's
obvious to me that the fact that settlements were established and the pace of
the establishment of the settlements made peacemaking much more difficult."
Blaming restrictions on Palestinian movement for the devasatation of the
Palestinian economy, the World Bank earlier this month acknowledged Israeli
security concerns but added that many of the restrictions were aimed at
"enhancing the free movement of settlers and the physical and economic expansion
of the settlements at the expense of the Palestinian population." The
settlements and their "jurisdictions" effectively control about 40 per cent of
the area of the West Bank.
The argument that the settlements are illegal, stated in successive UN
resolutions, and by the International Court of Justice advisory opinion
condemning the separation barrier in 2004, is reinforced by such an
authoritative source. It strengthens the political case in any "final status"
negotiations on borders with the Palestinians for genuinely equitable land swaps
of Israeli territory to a future Palestinian state if Israel is to retain
settlement blocks.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon secured a promise in 2004 from President George Bush
that large Israeli "population centres" in the West Bank could remain in Israel
in any such negotiations. In a subsequent letter to the Palestinians, the
President promised that final borders had to be subject to agreement by
negotiation.
Judge Meron's memorandum was obtained from the Israel State Archives. His
subsequent defence of it amounts to a direct challenge to Israel's continuing
contention that the Geneva Convention's provisions on settling people in
occupied territory did not apply to the West Bank because its annexation by
Jordan between 1949 and 1967 had been unilateral.
The memorandum was written in September 1967 as the Eshkol government was
already considering Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Golan Heights,
seized from Syria during the Six Day War. It says that the international
community had already rejected the "argument that the West Bank is not 'normal
occupied territory'."
It pointed out that the British ambassador to the United Nations, Lord Caradon,
had already asserted that Israel's position was that of an occupier. It added
that a decree from the army command saying that military courts would "fulfil
Geneva provisions" indicated that Israel thought so too.
Judge Meron also says in his interview that such an argument would not in any
case have applied to the Golan Heights which had been undisputed as sovereign
Syrian territory prior to the Six Day War.
While the Olmert government has so far rejected calls for peace negotiations by
Syria's President Bashir Assad, it has been weighing a welter of internal advice
proposing that it explores talks seeking an end to Syrian support for Hizbollah
and Hamas in return for restoring the Golan Heights to Syria.
The memorandum, details of which were published by the Israeli writer Gershom
Gorenberg last year, also says settlements built on private land would
explicitly contravene the 1907 Hague Convention.
The only implicit acknowledgement of the Meron memorandum - which Mr Gorenberg
established also went to Moshe Dayan, the triumphant Defence Minister during the
Six Day War - was that one of the first West Bank settlements, Kfar Etzion, was
initially called a "military outpost" although it was already, in effect, a
civilian settlement. The memorandum said there was no legal prohibition against
military posts in occupied territory.
Ehud Olmert fought the Israeli election last year on a programme of unilateral
withdrawal from parts of the West Bank - usually thought to mean dismantling
settlements east of the separation barrier, which cuts deep into the West Bank
in places. But this strategy was abandoned after the Lebanon war.
Mark Regev, the foreign ministry spokesman, said yesterday: "We do not accept
that the West Bank is occupied in the classic sense." He added that it was not
sovereign Jordanian territory before 1967 and it had not enjoyed legal status
since the British mandate, which had the remit, underpinned by the League of
Nations, of establishing a Jewish national home.
Be first to comment this article
Write Comment
Please keep the topic of messages relevant to the subject of the article.
Comments posted are the sole opinion of the author and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of AIM.
