NEW YORK — If and when representatives of 188 countries meet in Switzerland on Thursday, Israel will be on everyone’s lips.
Israeli officials, however, won’t be there.
The meeting is being convened specifically to discuss the enforcement of the Fourth Geneva Convention in “occupied Palestinian territory, including Jerusalem.”
It has been organized at the request of the U.N. General Assembly, which in February voted overwhelmingly to convene the signatories to the treaty governing the treatment of civilians during wartime.
Of the parties to the 1949 treaty, only Israel and the United States have firmly and publicly stated that they will not participate.
Because there is no precedent for such a conference, some fundamental questions concerning its procedures and goals have yet to be answered. With less than a week before the scheduled date, it is still not clear whether the conference actually will be held as planned.
The conference would be the first meeting of the parties to the treaty for any reason since it was adopted 50 years ago.
Israel and the United States have criticized the meeting as a political manipulation of humanitarian law aimed at forcing Israel’s hand on the issue of settlements.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Martin Indyk said the forum is being used “to put Israel in a corner on the settlement issue” and will “set a bad precedent for other issues.”
The Palestinians, however, have support from the more than 100 countries in the Non-Aligned Movement at the United Nations for holding the meeting.
Some European states, Germany foremost among them, want a delay, as the meeting would come just after Israel’s new government has been formed.
Dore Gold, Israel’s U.N. ambassador, called the Geneva meeting “an anachronistic mechanism that singles out Israel” and ignores the “unparalleled risks” Israel has made under the Oslo Accords.
Israel’s opposition to the meeting also has a symbolic basis. The Fourth Geneva Convention was adopted in the wake of World War II as a measure to protect civilians from the kinds of force, intimidation and transfer of populations that characterized Nazi expansionist aggression.
Marwan Jilani, the counselor to the Palestinian observer to the United Nations, said that lack of precedence is no reason not to convene. “The policies and practices of the Israeli government are of serious concern to the whole international community,” he said, although they “might not seem to some people as serious as what’s happening in other places around the world.”
Israeli settlement policies during the last three decades, he said, are “the only case of settler colonization in our present time.”
Jilani said that in pressing for the meeting, the Palestinians “are not calling for sanctions against Israel, nor are we calling to establish criminal courts for Israel’s pursuing policies against the Palestinian people.
“What we are saying is that the international community has the responsibility to discourage settlements in the occupied territory.”
The current push for the Geneva meeting began in earnest in 1997, when the U.N. General Assembly — for the first time in 15 years — convened an emergency special session to discuss Israel’s plans to build housing at Jerusalem’s Har Homa neighborhood, which the Palestinians call Jabal Abu Ghneim.