Green-Lined: Does Monsieur Wettach think we're idiots?

In a letter to The Jerusalem Post on August 11, Pierre Wettach, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) head of delegation to Israel and places east, defends his organization against a critical article by Moshe Dann published on July 24 on how "settlements" became illegal. 

Wettach's defense consists of three points. First, that "the ICRC did not 'make up the law' which considers the settlements to be illegal."

But he obfuscates. What Dann meant, obviously, was that at the time the Red Cross ruled that Israel's actions violated the Fourth Geneva Convention, no formal court or international legal body had delivered any judicial decision on the matter. By adopting the position of "illegality" as regards Jewish communities, the ICRC was indeed making up the law.

Wettach's second point was that "the establishment of settlements, as a form of population transfer into occupied territory, is therefore forbidden."

No, the "establishment of settlements" is not a form of transfer. Moving Jews out of territory assigned to them by the League of Nations as their national homeland, while commensurately assuring them of the "right of close settlement on the land," as the Mandate reads, is true transfer. The sometimes successful attempts by Arabs to kick Jews out of their homes during the Mandate period, such as Tel Hai, Hulda, Hebron, Gaza, Jenin and later Atarot, Neveh Yaakov and Bet Ha'Aravah, among other locations, was true, unadulterated ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Arabs

His last point was that "the ICRC has never condemned or accused Israel of 'illegal occupation' because it is not the mandate of the ICRC to make [such] determinations."

I am dumbfounded. The "settlements" are "illegal" but the "occupation" is not? Does Monsieur Wettach think we are idiots?