A Democratic Socialist backed by Zohran Mamdani, Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is looking to stage an upset primary victory in New York’s 13th Congressional District, openly championed a notorious female terrorist convicted of plotting an Israeli supermarket bombing that killed two people, public records show.
“Help Rasmea come home! đź’—đź’—đź’—,” Chevalier posted to Facebook in December 2014 during the immigration fraud trial in Detroit of Rasmea Odeh, a violent Palestinian operative who’d been released from her life sentence in an Israeli prison as part of a prisoner swap before slipping illegally into the United States.
Chevalier—who is now leading incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat ahead of the June 23 Democratic primary—was back in 2014 helping raise money for Odeh’s bail so she could get out of jail in Michigan while she awaited sentencing for an immigration fraud conviction. Odeh was released but was ultimately rearrested and deported to Jordan in 2017 after her sentencing.
Earlier in 2014, when Chevalier was a student at Columbia University, she and her fellow members of the Ivy League school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine—which has since been banned from Columbia’s campus for threatening rhetoric and intimidation—hijacked a rally protesting sexual assault on campus. The SJP members shouted about “Rasmea Odeh’s rape” (Odeh claims she was raped in Israeli custody in 1969). The disruption earned an annoyed rebuke from a Jewish student, who accused the group of hijacking the event in a letter to the editor published in the Columbia Daily Spectator, the student newspaper, on Nov. 1.
“Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, wait your turn,” the student said, also noting how SJP had staged an anti-Israel protest on 9/11—another day which didn’t belong to them.
Three days later, an indignant Chevalier responded with her own letter in the paper, offering a defiant response to what she claimed were offenses against Palestinian students.
“When SJP spoke of Rasmea Odeh’s rape, it was doing so in line with the notions of intersectionality that I spoke about at the rally,” Chevalier said, accusing her fellow student of benefiting “from a colonialist power structure” and “silencing survivors of color.”
She also accused the student, who had been identified in his letter to the editor as being part of a joint program between Columbia and the neighboring Jewish Theological Seminary and was social chair of Columbia’s Jewish fraternity, of having “placed two Palestinian students’ safety on this campus and back home at risk” by allegedly refusing to blur pictures of them on a campus blog after they were photographed at an anti-Israel protest in the months following the 2014 Gaza war.
In the same letter, Chevalier also said she had personally experienced “sexual violence in Jerusalem”—a claim she offered no additional details for and something she does not appear to have ever spoken about since.
“I remember being struck by how quickly ordinary disagreements over campus politics and Israel were reframed as participating in systems of racism, colonialism, or oppression rather than legitimate differences. Jewish students often felt that criticism was directed at them personally rather than their opposition to Darializa’s and SJP’s anti-Israel positions. I also remember a broader effort to connect unrelated campus and national issues to the Palestinian cause, including debates surrounding sexual assault on college campuses. Reading Darializa’s writings today, including her more recent antisemitic comments denying Israel’s existence, I see many of the same themes that generated controversy on campus at the time,” a former Columbia student who knew Chevalier on campus told the Free Beacon, requesting anonymity for fear of reprisals by the vengeful socialist.
Odeh was sentenced to life in prison in Israel in 1969 after she confessed to participating in a plot to plant a bomb in a Jerusalem supermarket. The resulting blast killed two students. Odeh also planted a second bomb at the British consulate, also in Jerusalem, which caused significant damage to the building when it exploded. She was released after a prisoner swap in 1979 and later deported to Jordan. The bomber slipped into the United States in 1994 and was ultimately deported in 2017 after her immigration fraud conviction.
At Columbia, Chevalier, Odeh’s supporter, was notably a cofounder of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a notorious militant campus group which openly supports “armed resistance” by Hamas. In the spring of 2024, CUAD, which is not an official student organization and is therefore somewhat beyond the university’s control, organized the hugely disruptive protest encampment on Columbia’s campus and by October 2024 had become so radical that it withdrew its apology for a member’s statement that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” This past February, CUAD also posted a statement declaring “Death to America” after the United States launched its current conflict against Iran.
Chevalier, who graduated from Columbia in 2016, was not just founding militant groups during her years on campus. She also worked as an illustrator for the Spectator while an undergraduate, and opined on a host of other woke concerns.
In an April 2014 op-ed, she said she would no longer be willing to contribute her drawings to pieces for opinions that contained “subliminal expressions of racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, etc.”
When one commenter wrote, “Darializa, can you please stop whining about privilege for once? Literally. This is becoming a habit,” the author replied, “Stuntin’ is a habit. Get like me.”
That year, she also accused her school of having “a rape problem” while a controversy was raging on campus over a student dubbed “mattress girl” who was walking around campus dragging a mattress to symbolize a lurid rape accusation, made against a male fellow student, which was later debunked.
In an op-ed from February 2015, Chevalier said at the age of 15, she stopped straightening her hair because she realized it was “a testament to my internalized racism.”
When Columbia Public Safety sent an alert to students about local youth who were stealing bikes, Chevalier denounced the move as “criminalizing black and brown boys” in a letter to Columbia vice president of public safety James McShane.
If Chevalier wins the election, she will represent Columbia’s vast medical and scientific campus in Congress.
Chevalier, according to a poll conducted for Justice Democrats by Data for Progress, is narrowly leading a tight primary race with incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat to represent the overwhelmingly Democratic 13th district, which covers Upper Manhattan and the western Bronx. Mamdani backed Chevalier late in the race, breaking a reported handshake agreement with Espaillat to either endorse him or remain neutral in the contest. Espaillat supports Israel—the 13th district has a large, Modern Orthodox Jewish community—which may have put him at odds with the fiercely anti-Israel mayor.
Chevalier has already faced controversy for attending a pro-Hamas rally in Times Square the day after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis. In old tweets, she has also condemned interracial relationships and said she used the American flag as a washrag. She has blasted American military veterans as “child murderers” guilty of “war crimes.”
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