Melat Kiros
D · U.S. House, CO-1 · Tier 6
Tier 6, “Most critical of Israel / supports Palestine”
Democratic socialist lawyer (fired from her firm in 2023 for defending campus Palestine protesters) and DSA's national candidate who unseated 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette in the June 30 Denver primary (53.2% to 39.8%; effectively member-elect in deep-blue CO-1). Calls for a complete arms embargo on Israel — explicitly rejecting the defensive/offensive distinction in a June 2026 9News interview ('our selling of arms to Israel, defensive or offensive, gives them the cover to continue the genocide that's taking place in Palestine') — names the 'genocide' and calls Israel an 'apartheid' state and 'ethnocracy.' The firing followed an essay arguing that calling for Israel’s elimination is not antisemitic. Asked about rising antisemitism on PBS’s Firing Line (August 1, 2026), she said “my greatest concern right now is that the state of Israel is losing support all across the political spectrum here in the U.S.,” that the left was “leaving a vacuum” for “people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens,” and that “that land has a distinctly Jewish character, a distinctly Christian character, a distinctly Muslim character.” In the same interview she said a two-state solution would mean “expelling 750,000 people from the West Bank” and “ignores the reality of how Israel was created as a state and robs the Palestinian people of their right to self-determination,” and rejected treating a single state as “a zero-sum game,” as if it could not guarantee “the right to return for Palestinians and the right to some kind of reparations as a result of this genocide” while “securing basic needs and protection for Jewish people in what would be this new form of government.” The next day, answering criticism from Al Jazeera’s Sana Saeed, she wrote on X, “I fumbled this line”: “my foreign policy priority is ending Israel’s occupation, apartheid, and genocide in Palestine. I also reject the notion that anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” and “I have always been opposed to any form of ethno-supremacy, and I refuse to vote for any of our tax dollars to go to any government that discriminates on that basis.” Kiros joined the Sep 24, 2026 JVP protest outside the UN, saying “I will always stand with the people that are standing against a genocide. This is about humanity, making sure our tax dollars are not complicit in these atrocities.” In a POLITICO interview with Dasha Burns released October 16, 2026, she said Democrats must vote “to end our complicity in this genocide and stop sending arms to Israel,” and, asked whether her critics have a point, answered that the criticism is “a product of … what I have made abundantly clear that I’m against, which is ethnocracy. When you have created a state around, you know, one particular group, you are welcoming … any kind of criticism against the state being erroneously applied to the entire people.” Of her earlier description of the October 7 attack as an inevitable consequence of apartheid and occupation, she said “when I say inevitable, I’m not attributing any moral justification.” Answering Shimon Blau, an unaffiliated candidate who says he entered the race after she would not call the 2025 Boulder firebombing antisemitic, she told Denver7 on October 21 that she had heard from Jewish community leaders that the attack “was antisemitic in nature, and I hear that,” while calling it “an attack that was specifically attacking Zionism and Israel” and saying “this war and this genocide in Palestine right now is putting Jewish and Muslim people in danger all across the world”; her priority, she said, is that “every single Jewish Denver resident feels safe” and that “our tax dollars are not contributing to increasing any of that danger abroad either.” Endorsing her on October 25, 2026, The Denver Post’s editorial board wrote that she “wants to end financial aid to Israel and pass an arms embargo to force the Israeli government to the table with Hamas and negotiate a peace treaty for a one-state solution.”
A clean Tier 6: a complete two-way arms embargo (she affirms it covers defensive systems), plus a rejection of Israel's Jewish-state basis as an 'ethnocracy' and an essay — which got her fired — arguing that calling for Israel's elimination is not antisemitic and defending “one state, under the historic Palestine, where all citizens are equal under the rule of law, regardless of religion or ethnicity.” Two positions on Israel’s founding basis, and no hedging on the embargo. The one hedge on record, an August 2026 line on PBS calling Israel’s loss of support her “greatest concern,” she retracted the next day (“I fumbled this line”), restating that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. DSA's national candidate.
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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).