(Continued from p.11)
fore, seriously suggests that it is enough that the government was involved in the location of settlements, in making land available to them and in financing them in order to qualify as a government that meets the criteria of paragraph 6, that is, of "deporting or transferring parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."Far more grave is his pretence that he does not know the background and the significance of the form of words used in Article 49, nor what the specific purpose of the whole article was. Indeed, he denies there was such a purpose. He writes: "Another view of Paragraph 6 is that it is directed against mass population transfers, such as occurred in World War II for political, racial and colonization ends; but there is not apparent support or reasons for limiting its application to such cases."
This is simply not true. This is not "another view" (though the thrust of the text makes such a "view" unanswerable). It is the official explanation for the drafting of Article 49.
It is hard to believe that the legal adviser to the State Department has not read the official Red Cross commentary on the Geneva convention (even if only for his brief on Israeli illegality). It was the Red Cross that organized the diplomatic conference in 1949 in Geneva where the convention was adopted, and the commentary it prepared at that time is the official authoritative source for the background and the meaning and the purpose of its provisions.
On Paragraph 6 of Article 49, the commentary says: "It is intended to prevent a practice adopted during the Second World War by certain Powers, which transferred portions of their own population to occupied territory for political or racial reasons or in order, as they claimed, to colonize those territories. Such transfers worsened the economic situation of the native population and endangered their separate existence as a race."
Shmuel Katz, the author of numerous books and articles about Israel, is former Adviser on Information to the Prime Minister and former columnist for the Jerusalem Post and Ma'ariv.
(Editor's note: During the years since Syria began its occupation of Lebanon, the Syrian government has forcibly transferred hundreds of thousands of Syrian citizens to Lebanon, in clear violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention--yet there has not been the slightest protest from the international community.)
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Outpost - 12 - July-August 1999