The Lord High Executioner visits Jerusalem and Ramallah

Abbas still calls himself the Chairman of the PLO and wears two hats - one that calls for Israel’s destruction and the other that supposedly is anxious to negotiate with Israel and recognise Israel as the Jewish State.

Yet this is the man whom the Secretary-General comes to visit - taking the opportunity to repeat the following canard that has been part of the United Nations flawed thinking for the last 43 years: "Let us be clear. All settlement activity is illegal anywhere in occupied territory and must be stopped."

Let me be absolutely clear, and let the Secretary-General use the vast resources at his power to prove me wrong, there are no binding authorities in international law that support the Secretary-General’s statement.

There are legal opinions that support the Secretary-General’s view that are based on the provisions of the 1949 Geneva Convention. But that is all they are, legal opinions.

The most notable of these is the “top secret” legal opinion given in September 1967 by Theodor Meron - then legal counsel to the Israeli Foreign Ministry - only retrieved by a historian Gershom Gorenberg when researching material to include in his book, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977, which was published in 2007.

As Gorenberg tells the story:

As for that legal opinion: It was written by Foreign Ministry legal counsel Theodor Meron, a Holocaust survivor with a doctorate in international law from Harvard. Meron was the government's top expert in the field. A decade later, he accepted an academic appointment in the United States and became a world-renowned authority on international law. Today he is a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

His status gives particular weight to the words he wrote 41 years ago: "My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention."

Meron’s opinion, and others that support him, certainly must be considered but they are not the be all and end all of legal opinions on the right of the Jews to build settlements in the West Bank.

There are other legal opinions, by people of similar status to Meron, that take the contrary view and who determine that the settlements are legal based on the provisions of the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine and Article 80 of the 1946 United Nations Charter: two crucial pieces of international law that were not even considered by Meron or as far as I am aware by any of those supporting Meron‘s opinion.

These opinions include:

• the International Court of Justice in an advisory legal opinion on the effect of article 80 on June 21, 1971;
• Professor Paul Riebenfeld, an international lawyer who spent his life researching the Mandate Archives in Geneva and was present at the debates that took place at the San Francisco Conference in 1945 that led to the inclusion of Article 80 of the United Nations Charter;
• Judge El Araby, a member of the International Court of Justice; and
• Eugene Rostow former Dean of Yale Law School and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in the Johnson Administration and Director of Disarmament and and Arms Control in the Reagan Administration.

The Secretary-General would do well to heed the following words sung by Ko Ko: