(RNS) — “‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more or less.'”

“‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.'”

— Lewis Carroll, “Through the Looking-Glass”

We are living in a “through the looking-glass” world.

Humpty Dumpty came to the International Court of Justice in The Hague the other day. Mr. Dumpty attempted to teach us about the meaning of the word “genocide,” which Israel is accused of committing in its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza.

Mr. Dumpty, please take a seat.

I call upon my teacher and friend, Tal Becker, who serves as the legal adviser to Israel’s Foreign Ministry and senior research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute.

These are excerpts from his opening address to the International Court of Justice in The Hague on Friday (Jan. 12) as Israel’s representatives presented its defense against South Africa’s allegations of genocide by Israel in Gaza and a call for the court to order an immediate halt to IDF operations there.

He began by affirming the history and power of the term “genocide.”

Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who witnessed the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, is credited with coining the term “genocide.” He helped the world recognize that the existing legal lexicon was simply inadequate to capture the devastating evil that the Nazi Holocaust unleashed.

Tal shows how the accusers have distorted the meaning of “genocide.”

The applicant (South Africa) has now sought to invoke this term in the context of Israel’s conduct in a war it did not start and did not want, a war in which Israel is defending itself against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist organizations whose brutality knows no bounds.

The civilian suffering in this war, like in all wars, is tragic. It is heartbreaking. The harsh realities of the current hostilities are made especially agonizing for civilians, given Hamas’s reprehensible strategy of seeking to maximize civilian harm to both Israelis and Palestinians, even as Israel seeks to minimize it.

Read the legal definition of “genocide,” as it appears in Articles II and III of the 1948 Genocide Treaty. You will see it means the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such.”

It is not enough for members of a particular ethnic or national group to die in acts of war, which is a horrific and tragic byproduct of such hostilities. There must be solid, provable intent to destroy that ethnic and national group — and not merely the attempt to destroy an army, i.e., Hamas.

As terrible as the toll in Gaza has been, it is not genocide. Despite what the looking-glass world might say.

Tal, again:

But as this court has already made clear, the Genocide Convention was not designed to address the brutal impact of intensive hostilities on the civilian population, even when the use of force raises “very serious issues of international law and involves enormous suffering and continuing loss of life.” The convention was set apart to address a malevolent crime of the most exceptional severity.

But if Israel’s actions against Hamas do not constitute genocide, what does?

On Saturday, October 7, a Jewish religious holiday, thousands of Hamas and other militants breached Israeli sovereign territory by sea, land and air, invading over 20 Israeli communities, bases and the site of a music festival.

What proceeded under the cover of thousands of rockets fired indiscriminately into Israel was the wholesale massacre, mutilation, rape and abduction of as many citizens as the terrorists could find before Israel’s forces repelled them.

Openly displaying elation, they tortured children in front of parents, and parents in front of children, burned people, including infants, alive, and systematically raped and mutilated scores of women, men and children. All told, some 1,200 people were butchered that day, more than 5,500 maimed, and some 240 hostages abducted, including infants, entire families, persons with disabilities, and Holocaust survivors, some of whom have since been executed, many of whom have been tortured, sexually abused, and starved in captivity. Representatives of the hostages’ families are in this courtroom today, and we acknowledge their presence and their boundless suffering…

A survivor of the Nova music festival massacre testified to police to witnessing a Hamas militant brutally raping a young woman, as another militant cut off her breast and toyed with it. A second militant then raped her again, shooting her in the head while still inside her.

In one video recorded by a home surveillance system, a Hamas militant throws a grenade into a safe room where a father and his two sons have rushed to hide. The father is killed. The two sons are injured and bleeding as a militant pulls them into the living room. One child can be heard screaming to his brother, “Why am I alive? I can’t see anything. They’re going to kill us.” The militant casually opens the fridge, takes out a bottle and drinks.

You want “genocide”? Read the 1988 Hamas charter: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

Read Tal’s full speech. It is masterful.

For the nations of the world to accuse Israel, as the international embodiment of the Jewish people, of genocide is a cruel and cynical trick.

It is Holocaust inversion, by which others accuse the Jews of precisely what was perpetrated against them — perhaps as a way of reaching back into history and declaring themselves innocent of that crime, or being bystanders to that crime.

There are (at least) two big truths about antisemitism.

The first big truth comes from Bari Weiss, in her book “How To Fight Antisemitism,” “Antisemitism successfully turns Jews into the symbol of whatever a given civilization defines as its most sinister and threatening qualities.”

At any given time, take the worst thing that anyone can say about anything or anyone: Christ-killer, child murderer, well poisoner, kidnapper and torturer of Communion wafers (yes, that was a thing), xenophobic, snobbish, money-grubbing, capitalist, communist, insufficiently masculine, too masculine, sexist, militaristic, weak, strong, cowardly, belligerent …

Whatever it is, make the Jew into the epitome of whatever you find most distasteful. Paint the Jew with that brush. That is how Jew-hatred works.

So, today, what are among the two most disgusting words (and for good reason)?

“Apartheid” and “genocide.”

The second big truth: Every historical theme of antisemitism still exists. It is in the DNA of Western civilization.

What was the most ancient accusation against the Jews? According to the ancient Egyptian antisemite, Apion:

“Each year the Jews kidnap a Greek, fatten him up, then kill and eat him as part of a ritual in which they swear an oath of hostility to all aliens, especially Greeks.”

This led to the accusation that Jews were murderous, xenophobic and misanthropic.

This brings us to the accusation of deicide — that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus of Nazareth. (I heard this all the time when I was growing up on Long Island. Pope John XXIII famously proclaimed the Jews could not be held responsible for the death of Jesus; the kids in my town were several years late in getting that memo.)

Which itself brings us to the infamous blood libel charge: that on Passover, Jews would kidnap a child, kill the child, use the bones for matzah and the blood for wine.

Whatever happened to that blood libel accusation?

It did not disappear during the Middle Ages. It reappeared, in a different form, in the Leo Frank case in Georgia, and it reappeared in 1928 in Massena, New York, and in various other forms.

Whether it is the blood libel — or the accusation that Jews poison wells (i.e., that they are the source of disease), or that Jews are misanthropic rebels against society — you don’t have to go to one of those Medieval Times themed restaurants and tournaments to find it.

For the Jews, we are always in medieval times.

Frankly, we are getting sick and tired of it.

Please enjoy my new book — the first book to outline what a post-Oct. 7 American Judaism will look like — and how we can restore communal obligation to liberal Jewish life: “Tikkun Ha’Am/ Repairing Our People: Israel and the Crisis of Liberal Judaism.”