The question that first came to mind watching Kamala Harris’s brief monologue (it was billed as a press conference, but there were no question taken) after her meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was: Who is she talking to? Who is the audience for this?

By the end of her comments, I realized she wasn’t actually trying to convince or reassure anyone of anything. It would have been quite useful to hear her answer questions in the moment, but alas we’re not yet at that stage of the Kamala rollout.

One point of continuity between Harris and Biden, however, was made clear when the vice president seemed to address a Democratic base that no longer exists. She went to great efforts to project empathy for the Palestinians when the progressive activist base doesn’t want to hear anything about Palestinians. Their focus is Israel, exclusively.

Hence, “Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters,” is crafted to appeal to both sides. And that might have succeeded… in 1994. The activists who have been interrupting President Biden’s speeches and press conferences and church visits don’t believe Israel has a right to defend itself and therefore “how it does so” doesn’t matter at all to them. The rioters attacking police officers yesterday while painting “Hamas is coming” graffiti, the “tentifada” students on college campuses, and the captured academic institutions all share a strong belief that Israel’s self-defense is itself illegitimate.

Indeed, the UN’s special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Francesca Albanese, rejected outright Israel’s right to self-defense after Hamas’s October massacre.

“The right to self-defense can be invoked when the state is threatened by another state, which is not the case,” Albanese said in November. “It cannot claim the right of self-defense against a threat that emanates from a territory it occupies, from a territory kept under belligerent occupation.”

Israel’s putative occupation of Gaza ended 20 years ago, but Albanese is speaking the language of the global left, which does not acknowledge this indisputable reality. A very popular slogan among the demonstrators is “Resistance is justified when people are occupied.”

“Israel has no legal right to use any kind of force in Gaza—under any circumstances,” says infamous anti-Zionist Norman Finkelstein, who has been embraced by a new generation of progressives. The fact that Finkelstein’s assertion is objectively insane only makes these activists love him more. Finkelstein laments that the mainstream debate centers on how much force Israel may use. “But the fact is, Israel cannot claim a right to use any force in Gaza—whether moderate or excessive, proportionate or disproportionate; whether protesters are unarmed or armed, don’t or do pose an imminent threat to life.”

Rutgers professor Noura Erekat likewise claims “the right of self-defense in international law is, by definition since 1967, not available to Israel with respect to its dealings with real or perceived threats emanating from the West Bank and Gaza Strip population.”

In her speech, Harris made a plea for “nuance” in this debate. But as we’ve seen, nuance cannot get anywhere near the academy on the issue of Israel and the Palestinians. Nuance sees Jews as human beings with rights; the anti-Israel movement, as shown above, does not in fact believe that to be true.

“Ultimately,” Harris said today, “I remain committed to a path forward that can lead to a two-state solution.”

That’s great, but again, who is she talking to? There is no grassroots “pro-Palestinian” movement for a two-state solution. The entire premise of that side in the current debate is that Israel is illegitimate, a settler-colonial state that shouldn’t exist and won’t exist, if they have anything to say about it.

Does the vice president hear any chants or see signs at the many Charlottesville-like marches “for Gaza” that talk about 1967? Had she listened to the protesters outside Netanyahu’s hotel this week she would have heard chants like “Bibi, we’re at your gate/ We’re taking back ’48.” A popular refrain throughout the spring was “We don’t want no two states/ We want ’48.”

As I explained recently, it’s become increasingly common for activists and media figures and writers to simply use ’48 as a stand-in for Israel, so Israel’s existence does not have to be acknowledged even in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Kamala Harris is welcome to try to get a “We want ’67!” chant going at the next rally, but I don’t think it’ll catch on.

Harris spent a chunk of her remarks today repeating anti-Israel propaganda about Gaza, which is too bad—both because she shouldn’t be so easily played by liars and because the movement she thinks is “pro-Palestinian” in America is actually just anti-Israel. The impediment to peace is Hamas, which does not want a two-state solution and in fact exists to prevent it. The activists marching for Gaza in DC and New York and elsewhere are self-proclaimed supporters of Hamas, so they don’t want it either.

A large part of her audience for these remarks doesn’t want the Jewish state to exist at all, in any form. “I hear you,” she said at one point today. But plainly she does not.