In Israel, a historian has revealed that Israeli ministers were secretly warned just after the Six-Day War in 1967 that any policy of building settlements across the occupied Palestinian territories violated international law. The Foreign Ministry’s then-legal counsel Theodor Meron issued a top-secret memo concluding the construction of settlements would “contravene the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention”. Meron would later become the president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The memo is revealed in a new book by Israeli historian Gershom Gorenberg titled “The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements.”