I have been a Jew for 83 years. Though I’ve only known it for around 78. My parents explained it to me at Christmas in 1945, as the reason that I was not going to get a Christmas tree, like my playmates, in Los Angeles. It was at the end of the Second World War and Jews in the United States were coming out of the antisemitic closet that mainstream 20th-century America had constructed for them, and widespread news about the Shoah (Holocaust) had shaken them out of.

My parents were the children of immigrants who’d come to the United States, like many of those coming from Central America today, as penniless refugees, fleeing countries and people, threatening their lives. My mother’s parents came from Lithuania, where all their relatives who did not come with them were killed in the Vilna ghetto. My father’s mother was from Budapest, where the majority of her relatives were later shipped to Auschwitz. My father’s father came from Ukraine, three times, as he tried to bring out members of his family, including his father.

My grandfather’s father is the only one of my ancestors whom I know wanted to go to Palestine. Though we don’t know if he ever got there. All I remember my father telling me was that when his grandfather decided he could not live in Malden and wanted to follow the pre-World War I Zionist movement to Palestine, my grandfather refused to support him and would only agree to support him if he returned to Europe. My grandfather belonged to the Jewish Labor Bund, which was opposed to the Zionism of immigration to Palestine.

The Bund was a leftist working-class organization that promoted Yiddish and Eastern European Jewish culture as the basis of Jewish identity, in opposition to the more Western European and middle class, Zionist project of reviving Hebrew and seeking refuge in Palestine.

Growing up in west L.A. and the San Fernando Valley in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, I had a reform bar mitzvah and went to college, without ever experiencing the sort of fist-fight-in-the-schoolyard antisemitism my son-in-law faced in the 1960s growing up in Alexandria, Virginia.

It wasn’t until the mid-1990s, on returning to Amherst from a job I had in Iowa, that I learned from my friend Bob that we were both listed on a website as “Self Hating, Israel Threatening Jews.” You can still find references to it as the Masaada2000 S.H.I.T. List on the internet.

What was my crime? As far as I can tell, it was my criticizing of Israel as an “apartheid state.” And this is the point of my note here. There are a good many people, Jews and non-Jews, who think that criticism of the state of Israel is antisemitic, as so many white nationalists consider any criticism of the United States to be anti-American.

Those of us who read the newspapers are familiar with this mistaken view. In the same vein, the political left, or some on the political left, are called antisemitic, based on the same idea, that to criticize the state of Israel or the Israeli government is antisemitic.

I don’t mean to say that there are no antisemitic critics of Israel or anti-Semites on the left. I am only interested in making one point here: The Israeli government is not the Jewish people, however they may be defined.

Opposition to Israeli government practices, like the persecution of its Palestinian citizens, or the Palestinians who Israel’s government has forced through murderous violence into concentration camps on the West Bank and Gaza, is not anti-Jewish in any way. It is opposition to murderous persecution.

Nor is it anti-Jewish to support an end to the use of starvation as a military tactic and the mass murder of unarmed children and adults by bombing in the name of “attacking Hamas.” Hamas is not the Palestinian people, any more than Israel is the Jewish people.

If nothing else comes out of the horrendous terrorism of Hamas and the Israeli government, it should be, and I believe it will be, an end to the mistaken belief that it is antisemitic to criticize Israel, or to expect of the state of Israel the human decency we expect of all governments.

One thing that is antisemitic is to call any Jew, or American or Muslim who criticizes the Israeli government for its violence antisemitic.

Gary Michael Tartakov lives in Amherst.