I Left Biden’s Campaign Over Gaza. Here’s How Harris Can Earn My Trust Again.

Last November, I stopped participating in President Joe Biden’s national finance committee because I could no longer support his feckless approach to ending the war in the Gaza Strip, where Israel continues to use US weapons every day to kill innocent women and children. Now that Biden has stepped aside, I’m cautiously optimistic that Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, have the political space and resolve to do what Joe Biden could not: make a fundamental course correction in how the US is managing dueling crises in Ukraine and Gaza.

The need for such a shift could not be more urgent. Israel’s reckless decision to assassinate Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran and Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Lebanon has brought the region to the brink of a massive regional war, a war that is all too likely to drag US soldiers into yet another Middle East conflict.

I speak from experience when I say that Biden’s approach to the two wars has weakened America and brought the world closer to the kind of metastasizing global conflict we have all long feared. I spent much of the past few years as a frontline humanitarian worker in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and the Middle East trying—sometimes in vain—to rescue desperate families from the fatal consequences of Biden’s decisions.

The shortfalls in Biden’s conventional foreign policy approach emerged just a few months into his term with the poorly planned and unnecessarily chaotic withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan.

As Kabul fell in August 2021, I flew to Afghanistan to help hundreds of panicked Afghans escape Taliban rule, even after the last US soldiers left without fulfilling Washington’s pledge to protect those who had helped America.

If lessons were taken from the poorly executed Afghanistan withdrawal, it’s unclear what they were.

I was an early champion of Biden’s steadfast support for Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (I’ve personally provided over $50 million in direct humanitarian aid to civilians in Ukraine) and his role in convening the global coalition of allies providing Kyiv with the weapons and support its leaders need to triumph over Russian President Vladimir Putin. He was right to back Ukraine, and I think that decision will be seen as his biggest foreign policy achievement.

But the same lack of strategic clarity I witnessed in Afghanistan became apparent the longer the Ukraine war went on. Two-and-a-half years later, I’ve lost more Ukrainian friends than I can count. And while the US has spent nearly $175 billion on a policy that helped Ukraine beat back Russian advances, the strategy now appears to be to support a bloody quagmire with no military or diplomatic resolution to the conflict in sight. Ukraine’s current incursion into Russia serves as further proof of its capabilities. However, it will do little to fundamentally change the tide of the war unless the administration can finally bring itself to do what it takes to send the Russians back home.

We must ask for more of Harris. She and Walz still face an uphill battle against Trump, and preventing his return to the White House will require the vice president to do more than develop viral memes and “Brat”-era branding. To win back disillusioned voters like me this November, Harris needs to make a decisive break with Biden’s foreign policy and chart a new path for the United States as a morally grounded global leader, especially in the Middle East and Ukraine.

Part of this break has to include changing tack on Gaza. The war there galvanized American students in a way unseen since the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. Biden’s unconditional backing of Israel sapped his support among demoralized voters like me who expected a baseline respect for international law and innocent civilian lives. Biden’s “bear hug” strategy towards Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government failed to deter Israel from inching toward a regional war or from continuing to kill innocent Palestinian women and children by the thousands.