In the spring of 2024, many members of Congress were practically tripping over themselves to condemn and silence antiwar student protesters who were building encampments on their college campuses, calling for their schools to divest from Israel and its genocide of Palestinians. On Columbia University’s campus, the heart of the encampment movement, was alumna Darializa Avila Chevalier. She wore a kuffiyeh, was arrested alongside the students, and supported them as they faced eviction and expulsion — and derision from the highest lawmakers in the country. Now, Darializa is about to become a member of Congress.
On Tuesday night, New York City experienced a political earthquake — and Palestine was at the center. In addition to Darializa’s upset of an American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)–backed establishment candidate, congressional candidate Claire Valdez surged to victory on a platform that embraced calls for Palestinian freedom. Like Darializa, Claire’s face was already familiar to many in the Palestinian rights movement in New York. She regularly joined protests demanding an arms embargo, she was an early and vocal backer of the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) NYC Break the Bonds campaign to prevent the reinvestment of city money into Israel bonds, and she was a champion of the Not On Our Dime Act to stop New York tax dollars from subsidizing Israeli war crimes.
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When Mamdani won last year, many pundits tried to spin the victory as a one-off stroke of luck: he was charming, he was good on social media, Andrew Cuomo was an easy villain to defeat. But this week’s elections make it clear: New Yorkers want representatives who will fight for us. We want elected officials who demonstrate moral consistency, whether it is on protecting immigrants, ensuring tenants can stay in their homes, or halting the flow of US money and weapons that are fueling genocide and apartheid abroad.
JVP Action–endorsed candidates also won big in the state legislature. Aber Kawas, a longtime community organizer and leader in the Palestinian liberation movement, won her primary for state senate and will become the first Palestinian American elected to office in New York. David Orkin, an anti-Zionist Jewish New Yorker and immigrant rights attorney (and longtime JVP member), unseated a conservative Democratic incumbent. And champions for Palestinian rights Samantha Kattan and assembly member Diana Moreno easily won their primaries as well.
And in NY-10, progressive grassroots membership organizations like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice supported Brad Lander in his overwhelming defeat of Rep. Dan Goldman, which was a resounding rejection of AIPAC’s toxic politics and a punishment of Goldman for his vocal support for Israel’s ongoing genocide and apartheid. Lander ran and won in a deeply Jewish district on a platform that promised support for the Block the Bombs Act and a call for an end to Israel’s genocide.
Can anyone give this outsider an idea of how significant these victories “up and down the country” are? It sounds fantastic, but I dare not hope.
I can’t give much in the way of hard data, but the thought is that people are a) turning out to vote in local elections for issues that are important to them, and will likely also show up in bigger elections to vote for the same, and b) candidates are starting to run on these platforms.
These are both huge, because it shows people that these positions are popular and gaining support, which will (hopefully) in turn encourage more people to run on these positions and drive turnout from those of us who are fed up with not actually being represented in our governments. Basically victories by candidates running on these platforms starts to send the message that these are truly popular positions, and nothing drives voter turnout like the conviction that their position is popular and actually has a chance of winning.
TL;DR: the significance is (in my estimate) mostly based in psychology, but there will absolutely be local benefits for these communities.
That’s a really thoughtful and clear explanation. Thank you. I hope synergy you describe continues: of better candidates drawing out more voters, which surfaces more better candidates. The news from New York lately seems really good too, so hopefully it’s contagious.