When the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, announced the city’s first-ever municipal strategy to address antisemitism – a nuanced, multi-pronged approach ranging from greater security measures for synagogues to an increased focus on Jewish history in public school education – critics were quick to note what the 33-page document does not mention at all: Israel.

Israel has played an outsized role in Mamdani’s campaign and since his election, with the mayor standing by his years-long support for Palestinians, and frequently describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal.

His positions have split New York’s Jewish communities, and earned him frequent accusations that he is fomenting the very antisemitism he has pledged to fight. At the United Nations general assembly last week, Netanyahu – who is wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the international criminal court (ICC) and whom Mamdani had at one point pledged to arrest – called him “the antisemitic mayor of New York”.

Mamdani has gone to great lengths to engage with representatives of New York’s many Jewish communities and the antisemitism strategy, several of them said, reflects those conversations and the mayor’s willingness to listen to those communities’ concerns.

“This strategy is an important intervention that reflects the voices of the hundreds of Jewish New Yorkers consulted throughout the process, that celebrates the diversity and vibrancy of Jewish New Yorkers, and that commits real city resources to fighting antisemitism wherever it appears,” Rabbi Jill Jacobs, chief executive of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, said in a statement.

Still, many of the critiques hinge on an absence: Mamdani’s strategy does not endorse a specific definition of antisemitism, the subject of many disputes largely stemming over the centrality of Israel to Jewishness. Instead it mentions three different ones while noting that “New York City can and will leverage all of the tools at its disposal to combat antisemitism effectively without needing to adopt a definition for this specific form of hate”.

Federal hate crimes statutes, the strategy notes, also do not adopt a standalone definition of discrimination.

Instead, the strategy, which was announced on Tuesday, cites extensive polling capturing how Jewish Americans feel about safety and antisemitism and notes the diversity of ways in which they experience antisemitism.

“These experiences are shaped by individual perception, context and a person’s sense of safety, and may vary from person to person while still reflecting real concerns felt more broadly across communities,” the strategy notes.

The document adds that New York police have reported a “notable increase” of anti-Jewish crimes in the three years since the 7 October Hamas attacks in Israel and its subsequent war in Gaza, and references a string of antisemitic incidents across the country going back years, including the attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, which killed 11 people in 2018.

While Jews make up 12% of the city’s population, antisemitic crimes make up more than half of all hate crimes, the mayor said in a video introducing the strategy.

“This is not only unacceptable, it’s something we all have an obligation to change,” Mamdani said.

The plan has reignited criticism of the mayor – from both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine camps. A coalition of Jewish organizations and the New York board of rabbis wrote in a joint statement that the strategy “fails to address a central issue that the Mayor himself has perpetuated: rhetoric that demonizes and delegitimizes Israel inevitably leads to the targeting of Jewish New Yorkers”.

Meanwhile, some of the left have also been unhappy with the plan.

“One loud camp is (predictably) saying that Mamdani’s antisemitism plan is not Zionist enough, while another is claiming it’s (somehow) too Zionist,” noted Ben Lorber, an analyst who researches antisemitism. “Of course, the issue of antisemitism is overdetermined today by Israel/Palestine. But at root this is a municipal hate crimes prevention strategy. Nobody benefits by obsessively reading it through the [Israel/Palestine] prism.”

Those who praised the plan saw the omission of Israel as a welcome and deliberate effort to separate what has so often been conflated: antisemitism and criticism of Israel, which can veer into antisemitism but is not that by default.

Mamdani’s plan “makes it really clear that Israel is not a synonym for Jew”, Lila Corwin Berman, director of the center for American Jewish history at New York University, said. “Jews are not the same as Israel.

“In a very material way it is resisting what I think is a vector of antisemitism, which is the conflation of Jews with the state of Israel, which tends to produce some awfully antisemitic kinds of actions.”

She added: “If there is a sort of downside to it, I think it might be that it takes some critical thinking skills to understand why they’re approaching the topic in the way they did and not foregrounding Israel and Zionism.” Still, she said: “Some people, they feel as if Mamdani’s views on Israel are disqualifying.”

Mamdani’s plan came just a day after the US commission on civil rights, a bipartisan federal agency tasked with monitoring civil rights enforcement, issued a 220-page report on campus antisemitism. The report analyzed how anti-discrimination protections enshrined in the Civil Rights Act apply to campus antisemitism and drew a distinction – collapsed by both the Trump administration and many universities – between conduct “motivated by hostility toward people of Jewish ancestry as such” and speech criticizing “ideas or institutions” such as Israel or Zionism.

“The report makes clear that the former can constitute discrimination under the Civil Rights Act, while the latter generally cannot,” said Amanda Shanor, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has written about the Trump administration’s instrumenatlization of antisemitism charges. “The report explains that rallies, chants and protests directed at a campus community as a whole also generally do not constitute the type of targeted discrimination or harassment that is actionable under civil rights laws.”

Mamdani’s plan offers a roadmap for municipal efforts to tackle antisemitism, and the commission’s report offers a legal framework for universities addressing campus antisemitism while respecting free expression, freedom of assembly, and academic freedom. But the two documents offer nuanced interventions, informed by a diversity of perspectives, in a debate that has been largely flattened amid heated political rhetoric, said Jonathan Jacoby, the president of the Nexus Project, a Jewish group dedicated to combating antisemitism and upholding free speech.

“Some institutions and individuals are going to just see it as an opportunity to continue to bash Mamdani for reasons that have to do more with their own opinions about Israel than they have to do with antisemitism,” he added. “Mamdani’s strategy respects the complexity of the issue, and there are those who will try to dumb down the issue and flatten the complexity.”