On the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Occupied Palestinian Territory

Since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the international system has witnessed countless armed conoicts, all of which have had devastating impacts on the societies enmeshed in them.1 As the European state system evolved over the course of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, recourse to war was widely considered a legitimate tool of statecraft. As Karl von Clausewitz put it, war was “merely the continuation of policy by other means.”2 In the course of pursuing such policy, numerous territories were overrun and scores were left at the mercy of conquering armies that, more often than not, terrorized civilian populations under their control. It is with civilian populations subject to foreign military occupation that this Article is chieoy concerned. The atrocities perpetrated against the populations of occupied Europe during World War II accounted for the high civilian casualty rate in that war. In the territories occupied by Nazi Germany “millions of human beings were torn from their homes, separated from their families and deported” to death and slave labor camps, while their unguarded property was either looted or destroyed.3 Similar gross violations of human rights, though narrower in scope and character, were carried out by Japanese and Russian occupation forces during the course of the war.4 In the wake of what emerged as one of the most horriac episodes in human history, “representatives of almost every established State met in Geneva in 1949 to sign revised conventions intended to cope with the effects of the new phenomenon of ‘total