The battle for three Democratic congressional primaries in New York City has been defined by a conflict more than 5,000 miles away, with candidates spending the final days before Tuesday’s primary echoing the fiercely anti-Israel rhetoric that helped elevate Mayor Zohran Mamdani to power.

All three of the mayor’s favored contenders for the House — former City Comptroller Brad Lander, Assemblymember Claire Valdez and doctoral student Darializa Avila Chevalier —  underscored their criticism of Israel and its U.S. supporters as early voting began in the contested districts. 

Avila Chevalier took time in a televised debate on Tuesday to accuse the country of “apartheid” while seeming to compare the actions of Jewish settlers in the West Bank and the IDF in the Gaza Strip to gentrification in the district where she hopes to unseat Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) and other majority-minority areas.

“I saw so many connections between what was happening to Palestinians there in Palestine and what was happening to so many communities across the U.S., particularly Black and Latino communities, who have been priced out and pushed out of our homes,” said Avila Chevalier, who — like most candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America — draws her strongest support from predominantly white and highly educated residents of the district. 

“When we talk about displacement in the West Bank and Gaza, it is a very similar, visually similar situation, where people who have been in a place for generations, are being displaced because of corporate interests, because of folks who are coming in, claiming the land over, and buying it up and kicking the people who live there out.”

Avila Chevalier, who has come under fire for attending an anti-Israel demonstration one day after the Oct. 7 attacks, added during the debate that the “very institutions” involved in both the Holy Land and urban America are the same.

Valdez, vying against Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso for the seat of retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), has similarly brought Middle Eastern issues into the race for the district spanning parts of Brooklyn and Queens. As a new PAC, Real Fight NYC, began spending hundreds of thousands on ads attacking her record and boosting that of her opponent, the sculptor-turned-socialist lawmaker inaccurately suggested pro-Israel interests were behind the effort.

“Is it actually AIPAC?” Valdez speculated in a thread on X. “This is a well-established pattern from AIPAC and its affiliates, especially when there’s only one candidate who’s been clear and consistent against the genocide.”

Reynoso in fact has been a fierce critic of Israeli policy during the race, and the American Federation of Teachers subsequently identified itself as the main sponsor of the ad campaign. Valdez has neither apologized for nor retracted her remarks.

Even former City Comptroller Brad Lander, the lone self-described progressive Zionist among the mayor’s endorsees, spent his final TV face-off against Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) on Monday criticizing the incumbent for his past support for aid packages to Israel and his refusal to call the military campaign in the Gaza Strip “a genocide.” The day before, Lander held a rally with Mamdani and a bevy of left-wing Jewish and Muslim activist groups, which he took as another occasion to condemn Israel.

“We’re united around a belief that a better world is possible — one in which we don’t compromise on anyone’s humanity. One in which we are not complicit in occupation and genocide,” he wrote on X. “One in which everyone has a home they can afford, with no bombs falling on it, in a place where they are both safe and free.”

Mamdani, for his part, vowed at a rally for the trio Thursday evening that they would help combat “monsters” that he claimed dominate the political process. The only such quarry he called out by name, though, was AIPAC.

“AIPAC, for whom the only thing more frightening than democracy being allowed to run its course is an end to genocide and [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu’s wars,” the mayor told the roaring crowd.