For more than ten months, we have witnessed the unimaginable suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. By official estimates, over 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel’s incursion into the territory began. Some researchers estimate a much higher death toll, with hundreds of thousands possibly dead in the small territory of around two million people. Despite this incomprehensible slaughter, in which at least forty-five Palestinians are dead for every Israeli killed on October 7, US military support for Israel has continued without interruption. Just recently, $20 billion of US tax dollars have been diverted to Israel. That US taxpayer support for Israel’s arms and materiel continues — amid numerous credible allegations that the country has violated human rights and committed large-scale atrocities against civilians — is a national shame.

This deadly addiction to war is not confined to the Gaza Strip. At home in the United States, the Israel Defense Forces have engaged in joint training and intelligence sharing with US police agencies. This has included training in racial profiling and violent suppression of protests, according to the 2018 report Deadly Exchange: The Dangerous Consequences of US-Israel Law Enforcement Exchanges. Among the organizations that fund these exchanges is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has also recently made headlines for pouring millions into successful campaigns to defeat members of the Squad in Congress, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, for the high crime of speaking out against Israel’s never-ending bloodbath.

As lifelong supporters of the Democratic Party, it has saddened us greatly to see the party’s complicity in the slaughter in Gaza, as well as its refusal to address the corrosive effects of dark money in politics. We were proud supporters of the Uncommitted movement and worked as part of RootsAction to get Joe Biden to step aside, largely over his failure to stop or even publicly challenge Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign.

And yet we cannot help but feel refreshed, even invigorated by the new choice at the top of the ticket. As women of color, deeply rooted in the struggles of black women and those from the Middle East and Asia, we know what it feels like to be used for diverse photo ops, only to be told to be quiet and patient under a system that prioritizes profit over people and spends billions of our tax dollars on bombs while our own children go hungry. We know all too well how it feels to lose sons and daughters to hunger and police brutality domestically, and watch sons and daughters who look like ours slaughtered under collapsed buildings and starve to death.

That is why we are calling on Kamala Harris to adopt stances that speak directly to our communities. We ask her to call for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza — a cease-fire without preconditions, without impossible demands cynically made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultra-right government. Israel is extraordinarily dependent on the United States for its ongoing support of their military operations, and Harris should publicly affirm that she will leverage this dependency to demand an end to the slaughter in Gaza. If these demands are made, she would boldly differentiate herself from Joe Biden’s policies and show, in detail, how her tenure can differ from his.

The “vote blue no matter who” rallying cry of the Democratic Party every four years to raise the alarm against the dangers posed by the far right is not enough. Demanding voters head to the ballot box on the argument that voting for the lesser of two evils suffices is not enough. The Democratic Party can’t simply pay lip service to issues like Gaza.

We need a party that is willing to take a stand against hypermilitarization. We need leaders who pursue diplomacy rather than genocide. We need leaders who are committed to addressing the root causes of conflict and poverty, both internationally and at home.

Like the nearly 700,000 Uncommitted voters, we need more substance from the Harris ticket; “at least she isn’t the other guy” won’t motivate enough voters to go to the polls. The Harris-Walz ticket must present a platform that prioritizes undoing the legacy of US imperial violence. Pouring billions of our tax dollars into funding weapons used against innocent civilians in Palestine, while denying hardworking Americans health care, housing, and human rights, is not a winning strategy.