A few weeks ago the Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab honoured one of the world’s most distinguished Jewish jurists.

Theodor Meron, 89, was president of the International Criminal Court’s tribunal for Yugoslavia and also heard appeals for cases relating to the Rwandan genocide.

The Foreign Secretary, who was working as a lawyer on war crimes in the Hague when he met Judge Meron, described him as “something of a legend”.

Presenting him with the Honorary Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, Mr Raab said he was “one of the most celebrated legal figures in recent times, playing a crucial role in building international criminal justice and humanitarian law”.

Born in Poland in 1930, Judge Meron was a survivor of the Holocaust, losing most of his family before he came to Israel.

A graduate of the Hebrew University, he was legal adviser to the Israeli Foreign Ministry for several years before he left for an academic post in the United States in 1977.

In 1967, a few months after Israel’s spectacular victory in the Six-Day War, its government was considering whether to establish settlements in the newly conquered territories.

When Mr Meron was asked for his opinion, it was clear: “My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention."

His advice was contained in a memo labelled top secret at the time. But it was later discovered and published by the American Israeli writer Gershon Gorenberg, author of The Accidental Empire; Israel and the Birth of the Settlements 1967-77.

Although he accepted that the status of the West Bank was uncertain, he warned that the international community would not accept settlement. In an article in the New York Times, Gorenberg quoted Meron’s view that “certain Israeli actions are inconsistent with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory”.

The lawyer noted that during the Six Day War a military order had instructed that Israel’s military court should apply the Geneva Conventions in the West Bank.

The fourth Geneva Convention says that an occupying power should not move its own civilians into territory it occupies.

In his 1967 memo, Mr Meron said: “The prohibition therefore is categorical and not conditional upon the motives for the transfer or its objectives. Its purpose is to prevent settlement in occupied territory of citizens of the occupying state.

“If it is decided to go ahead with Jewish settlement in the administered territories, it seems to me vital, therefore, that settlement is carried out by military and not civilian entities.

“It is also important, in my view, that such settlement is in the framework of camps and is, on the face of it, of a temporary rather than permanent nature.”

In the Etzion Bloc, where there had been pre-state villages which were destroyed by the Arab Legion in 1948, Judge Meron acknowledged the case for settlement could be helped by claiming this was “a return to the settlers’ homes”.

But he still warned of negative international reaction to the idea.

Not long after, a group of settlers arrived in Kfar Etzion in the West Bank. Although they were called “Nahal soldiers,” Gorenberg wrote, this was a ruse: they were actually civilians.