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Video: Israel and Syria: The UN and the Distortion of International Law

(Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) Dore Gold - This month, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, Prince Zeid bin Ra'ad, described Israeli settlements as a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 states that "Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of an occupying power," is prohibited, and that "the occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." Eugene Rostow, a former Dean of Yale Law School, served at the time of the 1967 Six-Day War as Undersecretary of State. With the memory of the Second World War in mind, he explained that the Fourth Geneva Convention was intended to preclude mass deportations of a state's population into territory that its forces had occupied for the purpose of extermination, slave labor, and other nefarious crimes. Rostow rejected any link between Israeli settlements and the Fourth Geneva Convention. It is obscene to connect Israel with an international convention conceived to prevent actions like the transfer of German Jews to occupied Poland for extermination. The Syrian civil war has involved the mass forcible transfer of Syrian Sunni Arabs out of Syria into Turkey, Jordan, and Europe. At the same time, there's a parallel effort under way, sponsored by Iran, to colonize Syria with Shiite Muslims. Removing one population and bringing in another is the very type of activity that the Geneva Convention was conceived to prevent. The UN is distorting international law, focusing on the wrong issues and leaving some of the greatest abuses of human rights since World War II unanswered. Amb. Dore Gold, former director general of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Israeli ambassador to the UN, is president of the Jerusalem Center.
2018-03-29 00:00:00
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