After winning her primary, Democratic congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier closed her victory speech with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani by her side, promising a “New York that truly invests in babies, not bombs.”
The line captured her campaign, which centered on ending U.S. military support for Israel and imposing an arms embargo.
Avila Chevalier, a graduate student and pro-Palestinian organizer at Columbia University as well as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), had just ousted five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat, who was backed by AIPAC.
She is not alone. Four other DSA members, all of whom are fierce critics of Israel, are favored to win House seats in November. If all five win, they would join Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, giving DSA seven members – its larges congressional presence since its foundation in 1982.
If Democrats retake the House, those numbers could translate into leverage over the party’s leadership, and particularly on U.S.-Israel relations.
According to The Wall Street Journal, DSA-backed congressional candidates have been discussing privately what commitments they could seek from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries if Democrats retake the House. Among the conditions under consideration before supporting Jeffries for speaker is an end to U.S. military aid to Israel.
The DSA and the congressional candidates contacted by Haaretz did not respond to requests for comment on the report.
DSA nominees share a demand to end U.S. military aid to Israel and call Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. But they differ on how far they take their criticism and in their attitudes about the October 7 attacks and the pro-Palestinian protests that followed.
In New York, Claire Valdez, a state Assembly member who shared the stage with Avila Chevalier at the DSA victory party, had beaten Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso for the Democratic nomination. Valdez was backed by Mamdani, a former Reynoso ally. A longtime DSA member, she ran on a promise to “end all aid to Israel.” She was arrested during a 2025 protest against weapons sales to Israel and supported the Not on Our Dime Act, which would bar New York nonprofits from providing unauthorized support for Israeli settlement activity.
In Colorado, Melat Kiros, a first-time candidate and DSA member, beat 15-term Rep. Diane DeGette. In 2023, Kiros was fired from a Manhattan law firm after she refused to take down an essay that defended pro-Palestinian campus protesters, posted weeks after October 7 on Medium. She moved back to Colorado and worked as a barista before deciding to run. Kiros wants an embargo that includes funding for defensive systems such as Iron Dome. Kiros drew heavy criticism after condemning the 2025 firebombing attack on a Boulder march calling for the release of Israeli hostages, but refusing to explicitly call it antisemitic. Supporters have defended Kiros’s distinction between political criticism of Israel and antisemitism.
Chris Rabb, a state representative and DSA member, won the nomination for Philadelphia’s 3rd District and has called for Pennsylvania to divest public funds from Israel and promised to co-sponsor legislation in Congress recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian refugees’ right of return. In September 2026, he joined a group of politicians who protested Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s appearance at the UN.
In Michigan, state Rep. Donavan McKinney ousted former DSA member Rep. Shri Thanedar, who quit the group over its responses to October 7, though his Detroit chapter had already moved to expel him earlier.. McKinney has a “Palestine” section on his campaign website where he vows to end U.S. military aid to Israel, pledges to support the Block the Bombs Act and to resume U.S. funding for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
Avila Chevalier has gone further than many of the other nominees in defining her preferred outcome for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and calls for a one-state solution. An activist who helped organize the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia, she attended a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square rally a day after the October 7 attacks. There, some speakers defended the Hamas-led assault, including one who described the massacre and kidnapping of Israelis at the Nova Festival by saying the “resistance took at least several dozen hipsters.”
Avila Chevalier defended her presence at the rally, which Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez condemned, saying, “As someone who has followed the issues that happened in the region, I have seen a pattern in which whenever there is an incident, the State of Israel engages in a response that is often disproportionate and creates a greater loss of life.”
In September 2026, she was arrested during Netanyahu’s visit to the UN. On the third anniversary of October 7, she called on the U.S. to “reckon with the reality of our own failure to intervene in decades of dispossession, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”
Pressure from both sides
The DSA says it now has more than 120,000 members nationwide, an all-time high, and counts nationally prominent figures such as Mamdani and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez among its members. But converting a larger congressional presence into influence, however, will require navigating both a Democratic leadership that has resisted calls to end U.S. military aid to Israel and a DSA that has imposed increasingly stricter standards on the issue as its national profile has grown.
In August 2025, the DSA passed a resolution officially making it an anti-Zionist organization. The resolution sets criteria for expulsion and allows the organization’s National Political Committee to expel members by a two-thirds vote if they have “consistently and publicly opposed BDS and the Palestinian cause,” have made statements that “Israel has a right to defend itself” or maintain affiliation with groups including AIPAC, Democratic Majority for Israel and even the liberal pro-Israel group J Street.
In July 2026, it announced a national program that, in part, calls for the recognition of Palestine, supports the Palestinian “right to resist military occupation,” and calls for “a free Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital.” It also calls for ending military and economic aid to Israel and for prosecuting U.S. and Israeli leaders “responsible for the genocide in Gaza.”
Its pro-Palestinian platform has sometimes put the organization at odds with Ocasio-Cortez, its best-known member. In 2024, the national organization withdrew its endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez after she joined a panel on antisemitism organized by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and acknowledged that some left-wing criticism of Israel veered into antisemitism.
In 2025, the DSA reprimanded for voting to continue funding for Israel’s Iron Dome. But in April 2026, she regained the DSA’s endorsement after pledging to vote against any congressional aid to Israel.
After DSA-backed primary wins in June and August, centrist Democrats have also begun organizing against the group’s growing influence.
Third Way, a center-left think tank, announced it would spend $15 million to campaign against the DSA, which its president, Jonathan Cowan, called a “mortal danger” for the Democratic Party.
A group of moderate Democrat state and national leaders have launched a political pledge called Promise to America, which includes the declaration that “We are capitalist, not socialist.”
Fissures Within the Ranks
While the DSA is gaining national recognition and its platform on Israel has become sharper, some progressive allies and Israel critics have expressed reservations over its increasingly hard-line positions.
Democratic congressional nominee Brad Lander, who ousted incumbent Dan Goldman in a race in which Israel and AIPAC played a central role, quit the organization after the October 8 rally, which he said “was heinous, that spoke about Hamas in ways that I just thought were vile, and I could not continue to be a member.”
Although he shared the stage with Avila Chevalier during the primary, he declined to endorse her.
Will Lawrence, who won his primary in Michigan, said he allowed his DSA membership to lapse to focus on uniting swing voters ahead of the general election.
“I’ve got a lot of respect for DSA and the work that they’re doing around the country, but I felt a need to make it very clear that the platform we’re running on here is the one that has come up based on the conversations we’re having across the 7th district,” Lawrence said in an interview with CNN.
In a recent interview, Ocasio-Cortez emphasized that she is only a member of the New York chapter of the DSA, not the national organization.
The New York City chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America and its chapters at several of the city’s colleges promoted a pro-Palestinian protest outside City Hall on the third anniversary of October 7, criticizing Mamdani for retreating from his campaign pledge to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu under an International Criminal Court warrant. Mamdani had said in July that the city lacked the legal authority to arrest the Israeli prime minister, and further angered activists by declining to join protests against his September visit to the UN. The DSA’s New York City chapter pressured the youth chapters to remove their social media posts, but several DSA members and other protesters later disrupted an October 7 vigil Mamdani attended, calling him a traitor and chanting that they charged him with genocide.
The rupture between Mamdani and some DSA members widened over his decision to retain NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and his administration’s plan to combat antisemitism, which pro-Palestinian activists denounced as capitulation to “Zionist pressure.”
How much leverage the DSA has will depend on the size of a potential Democratic majority in the House. A large Democratic majority would dilute the democratic socialists’ leverage, while a narrow one could make their votes decisive in the race for Speaker
For the five democratic socialists poised to enter Congress, a narrow Democratic majority could turn an ideological battle over Israel into a concrete test of political power: whether they are willing to withhold their votes from Jeffries, and what they might demand in return.