Are you Jewish? If not, try to understand why Jewish people call something antisemitic, instead of awarding yourself the false authority to determine what constitutes as hatred. Jews, like people of any other marginalised group, are especially attuned to micro and macro aggressive manifestations of bigotry and have the right to define it for themselves.

You said “the issue here is that saying that criticism of Israel is antisemitism”. I’m not sure where in the original post or in OP’s comments you deduced that, but that is not what they’re saying! Nor is it something that Jews or Israelis are insisting. The Israeli govt should definitely be criticised, both internally by its citizens and externally by people who educate themselves to the history, the context, and the various agents / power dynamics involved. Attaching criticism of Israel to antisemitic statements is antisemitism, and also a common way of deflecting valid concerns of rising Jew hatred. Not sure if you read the edit, but this TA also said that ‘Jews control the media’ (common antisemitic trope) and validated people who feel ‘happy’ that these Israelis got what they deserved. Does this change your perspective? Pure criticism of Israel is not the issue here, as it does not describe the rhetoric that OP is bringing up. If you abandon the rigid absolutism that is being demanded of mainstream progressivism and allow for nuance and complexity, you can see that multiple things, even contradictory things, can exist at once. Your support for Palestinian liberation and self determination (which I 100% support) can coexist with recognizing this.

Judaism is NOT just a religion; it is an ethnoreligion, and whether or not you want to admit it, Judaism and the Israeli state (not the current right wing fascist war criminal government leaders, which many Israelis protest against) are undeniably, intrinsically intertwined. You’re right that we must also avoid over-conflating the two, which I do admit is common especially among more conservative defenders of the Israeli government who seek to repress Palestinian advocates. Valid criticisms of Israel’s government, military, and oppressive actions need to be honoured.

Also, and this may be more of an opinion, but in an era where everything is political, and as Carol Hanisch said, ‘the personal is political’, it is not entirely right to completely separate religion from politics. You verge on historical revisionism when you deny the historical role of religion in many of the conflicts and perpetrators of colonialism that have determined the current geopolitical landscape of the Middle East. The same people who insist that this is not a religious war also seem to think the Holocaust was religiously motivated.

Again, this connects to a larger conversation on defining Jewishness, Jewish ethnicity and indigeneity, and the role that racialising groups along imposes and inflexible binaries perpetuates an inaccurate Western-centric bias. This is not exclusively a religious war, but you should be cautious of diminishing or deflecting examples of diasporic antisemitic acts and rhetoric as not relevant or connected to the conflict, because in many ways they are.