Melat Kiros, Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Colorado’s 1st Congressional District, meets with members of Washington, D.C.’s Ethiopian diaspora during an event at Punch Bowl Social in Arlington, Virginia, U.S., March 15, 2026. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz

When Melat Kiros took the stage after unseating long‑serving Colorado representative Diana DeGette in the Democratic primary, she framed her upset as nothing less than a generational revolt. “We will not wait. Denver, the future is being written right now. Nothing is set in stone. We won tonight, but this is about something so much bigger than this moment, than one moment. This is a movement. And we are just getting started.”

Perhaps she is right. Her victory may indeed be the beginning of a movement that will see a new generation of extreme‑left, anti‑American and antisemitic candidates take office in the United States. Kiros, born in Ethiopia in 1997 and brought to the United States as a child, holds views that in previous years would almost certainly have rendered her unelectable.

Among them is her view that some Islamist terrorist atrocities were effectively deserved. The September 11 Al Qaeda attacks on the United States were, she has argued, “inevitable” – the predictable outcome of US foreign policy. Likewise, she has described the October 7 Hamas massacre and hostage‑taking as an “inevitable consequence of apartheid.”

Yet in much of the coverage of her win, that unsavoury record has been largely sanitized or scrubbed entirely. The New York Times cast Kiros and other “Gen Z candidates” as part of the Democratic Party’s “ascendant, youthful left wing” – supposedly fueled by the “generational frustrations” of their pandemic‑scarred youth, social‑media isolation, artificial intelligence and the war in Gaza – with little appetite to interrogate what that “ascendant” wing actually believes.

The Guardian, while at least acknowledging her September 11 comments, misrepresented the contents of the post that got her fired from a law firm in 2023, describing it merely as rejecting “accusations that law students who protested against Israel’s counterattack after 7 October were antisemitic.” In reality, the post went much further, suggesting that “calls for the elimination of the Israeli state” – exactly the kind of chants heard on campus – should not be considered antisemitic at all.

At NPR, Kiros was slotted neatly into a narrative about “more left‑leaning and younger candidates pledging to reject longtime political norms and practices.” Her positions were summarized in an anodyne list of economic‑populist priorities – “universal healthcare and childcare” – alongside “more politically polarizing issues like abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and ending U.S. military aid to Israel,” as though abolishing a federal law‑enforcement agency and dismantling the US‑Israel alliance – and, presumably, the state of Israel itself – were just another couple of items on a “progressive” wish‑list.

PBS, which quoted Kiros’ victory‑night pledge to abolish ICE and to end what she called the “genocide in Palestine,” could not find a word to spare for her refusal to describe a deadly firebomb attack in Boulder – carried out by a man who said he wanted to “kill all Zionist people” – as antisemitic.

And yet, worryingly, Kiros is hardly alone. She is part of an emerging cohort of candidates – many of them closely tied to the Democratic Socialists of America – who treat America and Israel not as flawed democracies to be critiqued and improved, but as fundamentally illegitimate projects. From Darializa Avila Chevalier, who declares that “Israel doesn’t exist” and calls the United States a “disgrace,” to a New York candidate, Claire Valdez, who celebrated the October 7 attacks as “resistance,” these are the new face of “progressive” Democratic hopefuls in the United States.

Perhaps the best‑known figure in this ideological current is Abdul El‑Sayed, the Michigan physician running for the US Senate on a platform of Medicare for All, abolishing corporate PACs and ending US military aid to Israel. In debates and interviews, El‑Sayed has repeatedly refused to say that Israel has a right to exist, telling CNN that “the question about a right to exist is interesting, because nobody’s ever asked me whether I believe Palestine has a right to exist,” and instead insisting that only “people” – not states – enjoy rights under international law. In a widely‑criticised fundraising email sent on the second anniversary of the October 7 massacre, he marked the date without a single reference to Hamas’ slaughter of Israeli civilians, focusing instead on “Netanyahu’s ground invasion of Gaza” and blaming AIPAC money for prolonging what he called a “genocide” funded by US tax dollars. In other appearances he has described Israel as “just as evil” as Hamas and asserted that “all US military aid – offensive and defensive – should end,” explicitly including missile‑defence systems like Iron Dome that protect civilians from rocket attacks.

The same pattern of moral inversion appeared again after the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – the head of a regime that is a sworn enemy of the United States, whose funeral crowds literally chanted “Death to America.” In leaked audio from a March 1 conference call, El‑Sayed is heard telling his campaign team that he does not want to comment publicly on Khamenei’s assassination because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today,” and concluding, “I just don’t want to comment on Khamenei at all. I don’t think it’s worth even touching that.” Pressed on how he would respond if reporters demanded a reaction, he joked that he would change the subject by attacking “the pedophile president” – a reference to Donald Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein – for “decid[ing] that he doesn’t like the front‑page news, so he decides to take us into another war.” In other words, the man seeking to represent Michigan in the US Senate, who has no trouble calling Israel “evil” and accusing it of “genocide,” would not bring himself to say a single critical word about the death of the Iranian Supreme Leader, preferring instead to portray the US‑Israel strike that killed him as a self‑serving distraction engineered by Washington.

If El‑Sayed represents the statewide, nationalised version of this politics, New York’s Darializa Avila Chevalier is its rawest, least filtered expression at the district level. As unearthed tweets and video clips have shown, Chevalier does not simply criticise Israeli policy; she rejects the country’s very existence. In one post she retweeted a meme reading “Israel suddenly disappears, your third emoji is your reaction” and replied, “Trick question — Israel doesn’t exist!”, explicitly denying Israel’s legitimacy as a state. In others she called the US a “f—ing disgrace,” boasted about wiping her filthy hands on an American flag rather than using a napkin, and mocked veterans as perpetrators of “war crimes” who deserve homelessness. Her contempt extends far beyond foreign policy. Chevalier has advocated “a world without borders – just like a world without prisons or police,” clarified that she means “yes, literally, abolish the border… all deportation is wrong,” and told critics of police abolition “f–k you… we’re gonna defund and abolish… no more police at all ever,” rejecting even the idea of a reformed police force. Economically, she has demanded that the US “seize all properties from landlords,” nationalize hospitals, utilities and pharmaceutical companies, dismantle insurance companies and cut the defence budget to “$0,” while posting communist slogans (“seize the means of production”) and expressing fascination with “the pyromania associated with anarchism.”

El‑Sayed, who has campaigned alongside antisemitic streamer Hasan Piker, marks a deeply worrying chapter for US Jews given his reticence to unequivocally condemn domestic antisemitic terrorism. That reluctance was laid bare after the truck‑ramming attack at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, which the FBI described as a “Hezbollah‑inspired act of terrorism purposely targeting the Jewish community” and the state’s largest synagogue. In a statement and subsequent video, El‑Sayed nominally condemned the attack but immediately folded it into a narrative about Israel’s war in Lebanon, emphasising that the attacker’s brother, almost immediately revealed to be a Hezbollah commander, had been killed in an Israeli airstrike and commenting that “hurt people hurt people,” as though the attempted mass murder of Jewish children in Michigan were best understood as the displaced rage of a man “hurt” by Israel.

In the immediate aftermath of October 7, Chevalier joined a Times Square rally so virulently pro‑Hamas that even Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez later said she was “appalled and horrified” by the spectacle of demonstrators waving swastikas and cheering the massacre. In older posts she claimed that the United States has committed “greater atrocities than Hamas,” pointed to the atomic bombings of Japan as proof that only Washington “has ever used that kind of force,” and shared fringe conspiracy content about COVID‑19 originating in France from Chinese state propaganda outlets. She has even turned her fire on fellow “progressives,” accusing Bernie Sanders of “liberal Zionism” and blasting AOC for voting “present” on Israeli military funding, making clear that, in her worldview, anything short of the total destruction of the Jewish state is betrayal.

Fellow New Yorker Claire Valdez’s record is less profane but no less radical. The Queens assemblymember, now the Democratic nominee in NY‑07, describes herself as a democratic socialist and has helped build the DSA machine that elevated Zohran Mamdani to the mayoralty. She is a committed supporter of the BDS campaign and, in a DSA questionnaire, pledged to “refrain from any affiliation” with “Zionist lobbying groups,” naming J Street alongside AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel as organisations she will not work with. Shortly after Hamas’ October 7 massacre, Valdez “liked” an X post reading “Glory to the resistance and the people of Palestinian [sic],” effectively endorsing the attacks as part of a heroic “resistance.” In a Twitch interview she explained that she is running for Congress “in part because the Democratic status‑quo politicians turned away from our base when they committed to upholding Israel as an apartheid state and as a genocidal state.” She went on to say that “there’s a real hunger within the Democratic base to think about our foreign policy and the investments that we’ve been making,” embraced a prompt about challenging “Zionist politicians” and “right‑wing Democrats” as “such a DSA conversation,” and promised that, if elected, she will “stand up to the genocide” and “continue to call for Palestinian liberation.”

In Pennsylvania, long‑time state representative, Democrat Chris Rabb has increasingly adopted the same language of “genocide” and “settler colonialism” in his public commentary on Israel and the United States, helping to normalize a moral framework in which Jewish self‑determination is treated as inherently illegitimate and America itself is recast as a “genocidal” project. Rabb, who has flirted with DSA‑style rhetoric even if he is not a formal member, has endorsed calls for a “single, secular state” that would replace Israel as a Jewish nation‑state, effectively abolishing Jewish self‑determination there, and spoken of the United States as a “nation born on stolen land and stolen labor,” suggesting its founding was itself a crime. While his own electoral prospects are less nationally prominent than those of El‑Sayed, Valdez or Chevalier, the diffusion of this language through respected local figures like Rabb matters: it signals to younger activists and voters that to be on the “right side of history” is to see America and Israel as fundamentally illegitimate entities whose continued existence is not a given, but a problem to be solved.

Taken together, these candidates’ records point to a generational shift that goes far beyond policy disagreement. This “ascendant” left-wing is not merely more dovish on Gaza or more skeptical of US power. It is a cohort that increasingly questions whether America and Israel should exist in their current form at all – and is now, thanks to the very media that celebrate it, on the brink of turning that worldview into legislative power.

Born in London, England, Rachel O’Donoghue moved to Israel in April 2021 after spending five years working at various national newspaper titles in the UK. She studied law at the University of Law, London, and gained a master’s degree in multimedia journalism at the University of Kent. Rachel is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.