The Letter Behind Melat Kiros’s Political Rise
What her response to October 7 reveals about her politics—and the limits of her vision for Israel and the Palestinians
One month after the October 7 massacre, Melat Kiros published an open letter condemning Israel, Zionism and the response of major law firms to antisemitism. This essay examines the letter’s selective history, its use of anticolonial rhetoric to place the Hamas massacre in the context of Palestinian oppression, and its treatment of Israel’s existence as part of the problem. Most importantly, it asks whether Kiros offers any plausible path from anger and accusation to security, coexistence and peace. She does not.
One month after the October 7 massacre, Melat Kiros published an open letter attacking the position taken by more than 100 major law firms on antisemitism and Israel. Sidley Austin reportedly asked Kiros, then an associate at the firm, to remove the letter. She refused and was fired—an event that helped redirect her from corporate law into progressive politics and ultimately a run for Congress.
The letter deserves to be considered in three parts. First are its familiar anti-Israel arguments: claims that are, in my view, misleading or wrong but are widely made and can be debated. Second are its more inflammatory conclusions about October 7, Zionism and Israel’s continued existence—the portions that help explain why the letter had such serious professional consequences. Third is the larger question of utility. Even apart from whether its claims are correct, does Kiros’s rhetoric offer any plausible path toward peace, coexistence or a workable political settlement?
Much of the letter consists of standard anti-Israel fare. Kiros describes Israel as a colonial and occupying power, characterizes its treatment of Palestinians as apartheid and argues that its military response after October 7 constituted disproportionate force and collective punishment. Many people hold some or all these views, and each deserves serious discussion. But Kiros presents them as settled conclusions while offering, at best, an extraordinarily selective account of the conflict.
Israel is not simply a European colonial outpost populated by descendants of foreign settlers. A large share of Israeli Jews are descended from people who fled or were driven from communities elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa. Around half of Israel’s Jewish population has roots in Arab or other Muslim countries, where ancient Jewish communities have now almost entirely disappeared. Their experience does not fit comfortably within a simple story of European colonizers displacing an indigenous population.
Nor does Kiros’s colonial account adequately acknowledge the role of Britain—the actual imperial power governing Palestine. At precisely the moment Jews were desperately attempting to escape Nazi persecution, Britain sharply restricted Jewish immigration. Jews fleeing for their lives were prevented from reaching Palestine, and many refugees and Holocaust survivors were forced to attempt entry clandestinely. That history does not erase Palestinian suffering, but it greatly complicates Kiros’s portrayal of Zionism as little more than an imperial project imposed upon the region.
The apartheid accusation is especially unpersuasive when applied indiscriminately to Israel within its pre-1967 boundaries. Get off an airplane in Israel and one immediately encounters a multilingual country: Hebrew, Arabic and English appear together on many airport, road and public signs. Arab citizens vote, form political parties, serve in the Knesset, work as physicians and university professors, and have served as judges, including on Israel’s Supreme Court.
Muslim religious life is not prohibited or driven underground. Israel contains hundreds of mosques, and Muslim citizens have access to a state-recognized system of Sharia courts that decides marriage, divorce, alimony, paternity and other personal-status matters. These are unusual features for a country supposedly organized around the systematic exclusion of its Arab population.
Cross-country comparisons are difficult, and substantial economic disparities remain between Arab and Jewish citizens within Israel. Even so, Arab citizens of Israel appear broadly on par economically with citizens of other Arab countries in the region and better off than those in several neighboring states. They possess citizenship, voting rights, political representation, religious institutions and access to an independent court system. Inequality and discrimination deserve criticism, but they are not synonymous with apartheid, and Israel bears little resemblance to South Africa’s former system of legally mandated racial separation and political exclusion. The comparative economic position of Arab Israelis is an interesting subject that merits fuller treatment in a separate comment.
Conditions in the West Bank present a more difficult case because Palestinians there live under varying combinations of Israeli military control and Palestinian Authority administration without Israeli citizenship. The Oslo process was intended to replace that arrangement gradually with Palestinian self-government and a negotiated settlement, but it failed. In my view, much of the responsibility lies with Palestinian and broader Arab leaders who repeatedly rejected an achievable partial settlement coupled to a promise of more to come.
The claim that Israel used excessive force after October 7 is also widely held and cannot simply be dismissed. The scale of Palestinian civilian suffering was immense. Yet Kiros gives little attention to the absence of any easy Israeli response after Hamas murdered civilians, seized hostages, embedded itself within Gaza and promised further attacks. Israel faced choices among terrible alternatives: leave Hamas in power, negotiate under the pressure of mass hostage-taking, or conduct a military campaign in one of the world’s most densely populated urban environments. One can criticize how Israel fought the war without pretending that it had an obvious, humane and risk-free solution available.
The portions of Kiros’s letter that most clearly set it apart—and likely explain the reaction of Sidley Austin’s partners—begin with her argument that violent Palestinian resistance is the predictable consequence of colonialism and occupation. Many people accuse Israel of occupation, apartheid or excessive force. Far fewer, especially one month after October 7, applied a theory of anticolonial violence so directly to the murder and kidnapping of Israeli civilians.
Kiros invokes an anticolonial passage associated with Jean-Paul Sartre, describes October 7 with the words “We saw this gaze,” and says the massacre “did not occur in a vacuum.” The invocation is especially peculiar because Sartre himself was, at least in a qualified sense, a Zionist: he welcomed Israel’s creation as a legitimate expression of Jewish national independence, even as he later advocated recognition of Palestinian national rights. Although Kiros calls the attack unjustifiable, her surrounding rhetoric portrays it as the foreseeable response of an oppressed population to its occupier. To many readers, this sounds less like historical context than a partial rationalization of terrorism.
She then places Hamas’s massacre and Israel’s military response side by side as unjustifiable acts. A law firm did not have to oppose criticism of Israel to view this as extraordinarily poor judgment. While victims were still being identified and hostages remained in Gaza, Kiros moved quickly from condemning the massacre to explaining why Israel had supposedly brought it upon itself.
There is nevertheless an uncomfortable truth beneath the rhetoric: this conflict has produced violence, trauma and hatred on both sides. Every day on my LinkedIn feed, I encounter another account of an October 7 atrocity or of an earlier attack on Jews in Palestine, often beginning with the 1929 Hebron massacre. Kiros presents Palestinian violence almost entirely as a response to Israeli oppression, but history is not that simple. For every violent act against Palestinians cited in her letter, I can point to a violent act committed against Jews.
Kiros briefly endorses a single state in which Jews and Palestinians possess equal rights, but she never explains how either people could reach that destination. How would Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other armed groups be disarmed? Who would prevent Iran and its regional proxies from exploiting the new state or turning Palestinian territory into another front against Israel? Who would protect Jews and Palestinians from communal violence, terrorism or an attempted seizure of power? Why would Israelis—surrounded by hostile forces and newly traumatized by October 7—surrender the sovereignty, army and secure refuge that exist precisely because Jews historically could not depend on others to protect them? Kiros does not confront these questions because her letter reads less like an effort to solve the conflict than an opportunity to assign blame and vent anger.
The history of failed negotiations is more complicated than Kiros suggests, but Palestinian leaders have repeatedly declined to accept an attainable partial settlement and continue negotiating from there. Rabin accepted the Oslo process, under which Israel recognized the PLO and transferred substantial governing authority to the Palestinian Authority. Barak and the Clinton Parameters contemplated a sovereign Palestinian state in Gaza and most of the West Bank, supplemented by land swaps; Clinton later described Arafat’s failure to close the deal as a terrible mistake. In 2008, Olmert offered Abbas a state based broadly on the pre-1967 lines, territorial exchanges, a connection between Gaza and the West Bank, a division of Jerusalem and international administration of the holy sites. Abbas did not accept the proposal, and Olmert warned that another comparable offer might not appear for 50 years. After October 7, even that prediction may look optimistic.
Some form of Swiss-style federation or confederation may ultimately offer a better long-term answer than either permanent occupation or an artificial effort to divide every road, settlement and holy place. Such a system might combine autonomous Jewish and Palestinian cantons or states with shared federal institutions, local control over civil affairs and joint responsibility for infrastructure, economic policy and external security. But it would first require a viable Palestinian governing authority capable of enforcing the law, controlling armed groups, resisting Iranian interference, accepting Jewish national rights and honoring agreements. Equality cannot be created merely by declaring one state; it must rest on functioning institutions, credible security arrangements and at least a minimum level of mutual trust.
Kiros’s letter contributes nothing to that process. By presenting Palestinian violence principally as a response to Israeli oppression, questioning Israel’s legitimacy and offering no credible transition from conflict to coexistence, her screed pushes both peoples farther from compromise. Venting may attract political supporters, but it is not a peace plan.