New York sends its hardest critics of Israel to the House

On November 3, 2026, the Associated Press called victories for Darializa Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander, and Claire Valdez in New York City House races.

The results were foregone conclusions. All three ran as Democrats in deeply blue districts; the decisive contests were the June primaries, where each defeated more moderate opponents with the active support of Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

What followed in the general election was simply ratification. Their arrival in Congress marks another advance for a progressive faction that treats hostility to Israel as a non-negotiable credential rather than a position open to evidence.

Avila Chevalier (NY-13) and Valdez (NY-7) are members of the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization whose platform is explicitly anti-Zionist.

Chevalier’s record is the most uncompromising. On October 8, 2023—while the scale of Hamas’s massacre was still being tallied, with more than 1,200 people killed, the majority civilians, many subjected to rape, burning, and abduction—she attended a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square.

Contemporary accounts describe participants celebrating the attack, chanting slogans that glorified “resistance,” and, in some cases, burning Israeli flags.

She has repeatedly defended her presence, stating she anticipated a “disproportionate” Israeli response and that she would attend again. During the campaign she declined for months to issue a clear condemnation of Hamas, framing the question as an attempt to ignore “75 years of occupation.” Earlier social-media remarks such as “Israel doesn’t exist!” and her organizing role in Columbia University encampments complete a consistent pattern.

Valdez occupies the same ideological space with slightly more institutional experience.

She has described Israel’s campaign in Gaza as genocide and apartheid, endorses the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, advocates a comprehensive arms embargo, and has supported legislation aimed at Israeli settlement activity. These positions were central to her primary campaign and helped distinguish her from more conventional progressive rivals.

Lander (NY-10), who is Jewish and styles himself a “liberal Zionist,” defeated incumbent Dan Goldman.

He has accused Israel of genocide on multiple occasions and was briefly detained by Israeli forces in October 2026 while participating in an olive harvest in the West Bank alongside Palestinian farmers and activist groups.

He characterized the occupation as criminal and spoke of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing. Although he is not a DSA member, his primary victory rested in significant part on voters who rejected Goldman’s more conventional support for the U.S.-Israel relationship.

These outcomes reflect a durable electoral dynamic in parts of New York City.

A younger cohort, shaped heavily by social-media narratives that cast Israel as a settler-colonial and apartheid state, supplied decisive margins in the primaries.

That framing rarely encounters sustained counter-argument: the repeated Arab rejection of partition proposals, the eliminationist language in Hamas and Hezbollah charters, the deliberate targeting of civilians on October 7, or Iran’s material role in the “axis of resistance.”

The resulting knowledge gap has become a structural feature of the Democratic left in several large urban districts. Mamdani’s endorsement and public rhetoric—refusal to affirm Israel as a Jewish state, repeated genocide accusations, and efforts to pressure Benjamin Netanyahu—amplified the signal.

In such safe seats the general election merely confirmed the primary verdict.

The longer-term cost for the Democratic Party is twofold. Inside Congress, members who treat Israel’s existence or basic security as illegitimate will remain isolated on foreign-policy questions even among many of their own colleagues.

Outside it, the party risks further erosion of support among Jewish voters and moderates who view the pattern as evidence of selective moral standards.

The underlying facts—Hamas’s explicit charter and October 7 conduct, Israel’s response to an attack designed to maximize civilian casualties—do not become optional because a motivated primary electorate finds them inconvenient.

Chevalier, Valdez, and Lander enter the House with clear local mandates. They also carry an ideological commitment that consistently subordinates the strategic and historical record of the conflict to political posture.