Darializa Avila Chevalier
D · U.S. House, NY-13 · Tier 6
Tier 6, “Most critical of Israel / supports Palestine”
Won the June 2026 NY-13 primary (≈49–46%), unseating five-term incumbent Adriano Espaillat — part of Mamdani’s NYC sweep with Valdez and Lander — and, in a safe Democratic seat, is heavily favored in November; she would be the first Dominican American woman in Congress. A Justice Democrats-recruited organizer who co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) and helped organize the 2024 Columbia Gaza encampment; she says she was arrested in April 2026 protesting outside Sens. Schumer’s and Gillibrand’s offices, calling on them to vote against weapons sales to Israel. She calls the war a genocide and apartheid, vowed to cosponsor Block the Bombs, and opposes US military aid — ‘babies, not bombs.’ Her positions sit well past most of this list, out of the BDS-aligned CUAD movement. On Sep 24, 2026 Avila Chevalier was arrested again, at the Jewish Voice for Peace sit-in outside the UN during Netanyahu’s address, saying “Benjamin Netanyahu belongs at The Hague; not in the streets of New York City, and certainly not addressing the United Nations General Assembly.” On the third anniversary of October 7 she wrote, in a post quoted by JTA, of “Israel’s nearly 80 years of violent oppression of Palestinians,” adding, “My heart is with those who lost loved ones and felt the pain of that day.” At a Jewish Currents Live panel on October 11, 2026, asked by Peter Beinart where Democrats should draw the line on legitimate Palestinian resistance, she said “I think international law has already drawn that line” and argued that protests in the U.S. should target Israel rather than Hamas: “We could be the biggest anti-Hamas protesters, but a protest against Hamas in the U.S. isn’t going to do anything because we don’t fund it.” JTA reported that on the same panel she repeated her call for an arms embargo against Israel. On October 28, 2026, sharing the DSA’s report that Israel had barred seven of its organizers from entering the occupied West Bank, she wrote that a friend from NY-13 was among those “detained by Israel at their illegal border checkpoint”: “Shame on the Israeli government for denying our collective ability to bear witness to Israel’s illegal occupation. Free Palestine.” In a Vanity Fair “Fair Game” interview released October 30, 2026, asked whether she regretted attending the October 8, 2023 rally, she said she would go again, because she “knew in 2023 what was coming was Israel’s response would lead to more and more death,” and that “the party that we pay our tax dollars to and that we support and arm is the Israeli government.” She named “signing on to the Block the Bombs Act to stop the genocide” among her first priorities in Congress, and listed whether a speaker is “gonna push for blocking the bombs” among what she is weighing before voting for Hakeem Jeffries. In 2014, as a 20-year-old Columbia student on a university-funded internship, she lived and worked for almost two months at a Tomorrow’s Youth Organization center in Nablus, teaching English to Palestinian children as young as three; she told City & State it was “a really formative period” in which she was “essentially living in the heart of the occupation,” and “I came back, and I couldn’t unsee all those things.”
A 6: one state, in her own words — in a July 2026 interview with Peter Beinart, as JTA reported it, she backed “one governing body, one state that sees everyone as equal before the law,” and said “Zionism is an ideology that creates this type of hierarchy.” Her record points firmly past Tier 5: in August 2020 she reposted a reply to the prompt “Israel suddenly disappears, your third emoji is your reaction” that read “Trick question – Israel doesn’t exist!” (CNN), defended attending an Oct 8, 2023 rally where slogans legitimizing “resistance” appeared, telling Beinart “I think the targeting of civilians is wrong in any context, including on Oct. 7”, and her CUAD background is one-state/BDS-oriented. She deleted a Twitter account from which the Wayback Machine had saved more than 3,600 posts (CNN) and says past posts don’t reflect her today, without disavowing the rally; asked by Vanity Fair in October 2026 whether she regretted it, she said she would attend again.
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elect26 places 2026 midterm candidates on a six-tier spectrum, from 1 (most pro-Israel) to 6 (most critical of Israel).