Matt Duss writes:

While no one expects Harris to dramatically distance herself from Biden, there are steps that she can take to show that she speaks for the Democratic Party of today and not 40 years ago. She can announce that as president, she will immediately suspend the U.S.-supplied military aid being used in violation of U.S. law. She can publicly make clear that she agrees with the assessment of countless Israelis—including Israeli opposition lawmakers and top sitting security officials—that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is stalling hostage release and cease-fire efforts in order to cling to power. She can reject the baseless and inflammatory claims that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the largest and most important relief agency in Gaza, is a “Hamas front,” and state that she’ll work to see UNRWA funding resumed as soon as legally possible. In doing so, she would join U.S. partners—such as Britain, France, and Germany—that have already resumed their contributions.

In response to Netanyahu’s repeated rejection of any possibility of Palestinian statehood, including his government’s passage last week in the Knesset of an unprecedented resolution ruling out any Palestinian state west of the Jordan River, Harris should say that while the final contours of a Palestinian state are a matter for negotiations, Palestinians’ right to a state is, like Israelis’, nonnegotiable.

The November election is a chance to offer a real foreign-policy contrast. Despite U.S. pundits’ constant use of the “isolationist” epithet against Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance, the reality is they don’t offer an isolationist foreign policy, but rather a unilateralist and militarist one, where the United States and its partners are free to use violence unbound by any of the international norms that Washington insists must be followed by governments that don’t buy its weapons.

Unfortunately, U.S. policy toward the war in Gaza reflects this same approach and reinforces the kind of systemic discrimination that the United States’ own civil right movement—in which the vice president has her roots—fought against. Harris has the opportunity to end this dissonance and offer a U.S. foreign-policy vision that upholds a universal set of rules and norms for the global community, instead of different ones for partners and adversaries.

In doing so, she would be arguing boldly and correctly for an approach that will ultimately enable us all to live in security, prosperity, and dignity.