Almost 60 years ago the Israeli government was told by one of its senior legal advisers that the Jewish civilian settlements it was supporting on the occupied West Bank, which it had annexed after the 1967 Six-Day War, violated international law.
In a “Top Secret” and “Most Urgent” memo, the adviser wrote that the occupation violated Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel was a party. His memo also said the occupation breached Article 46 of the Hague Regulations concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land by confiscating the private property of the Palestinians and Arabs who lived there.
The memo was written by Theodor Meron, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor who had obtained law degrees at Harvard and in Jerusalem. He was also a Holocaust victim – his mother, brother and most of his family were murdered by the Nazis during his childhood. “Surely, I thought, Jews, who were the principal victims of the Holocaust, would not dream of establishing colonies in occupied territories, even on Arab-owned land”, he writes in this memoir - essential reading for anyone concerned with law or human rights.
Meron, who arrived in Israel aged 15 unable to speak English or Hebrew, later served as Israel’s ambassador to Canada and to the United Nations before renouncing his Israeli nationality and becoming an academic in England and the US and a top UN war crimes judge.
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Appointed by the UN as presiding judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, Meron ruled that the murder of 40,000 Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serb forces at Srebrenica in 1995 was genocide.
He also ruled that genocide can include “subjecting the group to a subsistence diet; failing to provide adequate medical care; systematically expelling members of the group from their homes; and generally creating circumstances that would lead to slow death such as lack of proper food, water, shelter, clothing, sanitation...”.
[ Hagai El-Ad: Holocaust should not prevent world from seeing Israel as it isOpens in new window ]
As a special adviser to the International Criminal Court, he initially recused himself from Israel-Palestine cases, but he supported the 2024 ICC warrants for the arrest of Hamas leaders and of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
