I quit Biden’s Gaza campaign. Here’s how Harris can win back my trust.

Last November, I stopped serving on President Joe Biden’s National Finance Committee because I could no longer support his reckless approach to ending the war in the Gaza Strip, where Israel continues to use U.S. weapons to kill innocent women and children every day. Now that Biden has stepped aside, I am cautiously optimistic that Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have the political space and determination to do what Joe Biden failed to do: make a fundamental course correction in how the United States is handling the competing crises in Ukraine and Gaza.

The need for such change 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 will most likely drag American soldiers into another Middle Eastern conflict.

I speak from experience when I say that Biden’s two-war approach has weakened America and brought the world closer to the kind of metastatic global conflict we’ve all long feared. I’ve spent much of the past few years as a front-line aid worker in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and the Middle East, trying—sometimes in vain—to save desperate families from the deadly consequences of Biden’s decisions.

The flaws in Biden’s conventional approach to foreign policy were exposed just months into his term, with the poorly planned and needlessly chaotic withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.

When Kabul fell in August 2021, I flew to Afghanistan to help hundreds of panicked Afghans escape the Taliban regime, even after the last U.S. soldiers left without fulfilling Washington’s promise to protect those who had helped America.

It is unclear what lessons were to be learned from the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.

I was an early supporter of Biden’s unwavering support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (I have personally provided over $50 million in direct humanitarian aid to civilians in Ukraine) and his role in convening the global coalition of allies that is providing Kiev with the weapons and support its leaders need to triumph over Russian President Vladimir Putin. He was right to support Ukraine, and I think that decision will go down as his greatest foreign policy success.

But the same lack of strategic clarity I witnessed in Afghanistan has become apparent as the war in Ukraine has dragged on. Two and a half years later, I have lost more Ukrainian friends than I can count. And while the United States has spent nearly $175 billion on a policy that helped Ukraine repel Russian advances, the strategy now appears to be to prop up a bloody quagmire with no military or diplomatic resolution to the conflict. Ukraine’s current incursion into Russia is further evidence 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 home.

We need to demand more from 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 disaffected voters like me this November, Harris must 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 that disruption must include a change of course on Gaza. The war there has galvanized American students in a way not seen since the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. Biden’s unstinting support for Israel has sapped his support among demoralized voters like me who expected basic respect for international law and innocent civilian life. Biden’s “bear hug” strategy toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has failed to dissuade Israel from creeping toward a regional war or from continuing to kill innocent Palestinian women and children by the thousands.