In his response to my objections, Richard Kuper explains that Israel's commitment to Western values justifies singling it out for punitive treatment, because if we don't single it out we are complicit in its misdeeds; the really important thing is that we say 'No, Not In Our Name'. So this justification for singling out Israel is that it purifies us, it enables us to keep our hands clean (and better still, to show the world that they're clean). The narcissism of this argument, the absorption in our own moral condition, is not only unattractive, it's also profoundly (so to speak) frivolous - it puts us and our moral purity at centre stage, instead of the problems of those who have to live and act in the ghastly dilemmas of the Middle East. And the argument also leaves something quite unexplained: why doesn't a socialist like Kuper feel the same need to declare his purity in the face of other regimes, regimes which claim adherence to socialist values while engaging in oppressions far more deadly than that of Israel (North Korea comes to mind, as does China)? Is he not, as a socialist, complicit in the horrors they commit unless he constantly and loudly says 'No, Not in My Name'? (Myself, I don't think Kuper is complicit, but as far as I can see he ought to think he is, if he believes his own argument.)
But in any case it turns out that this part of the putative justification is redundant, since Kuper says that even if Israel abandoned its commitment to Western values (and thereby no longer supposedly required us to say 'Not In Our Name'), he would still want to single it out for hostile attention, since, he says, Israel would still be behaving unjustly, and so he wouldn't want to turn his attention elsewhere. But now the original question that his article was supposed to answer has disappeared from view. That question is about why people on the left (and elsewhere) single out Israel for hostile attention when other countries behave so very much worse, by orders of magnitude. And (this part of) Kuper's answer is that we have to declare that we're not complicit; but it turns out that even if we didn't have to declare this, we should still in his view single Israel out on account of its unjust behaviour (in preference to targeting regimes which commit, for example, genocide). So the reference to Western values and Israel's commitment to them is in fact doing no explanatory work - Kuper's desire to focus on Israel would, apparently, be unaffected by its absence, and is not explained by its presence.
Kuper then goes on to point out that the US's support for Israel is remarkable, and that I ought to find it of some interest. I certainly do; I entirely agree with him that it's remarkable, significant, and interesting. But what I can't see is how we're supposed to get from the fact of that support, and our interest in it, to the claim that we ought to single out Israel for punitive attention, rather than other countries which commit far worse atrocities. How are we supposed to move from 'America, the world superpower, supports Israel more than any other country in the Middle East' to 'Therefore we should give Israel harsher treatment than other countries which behave far worse'? There's a yawning logical gap, which cries out to be bridged by some such intermediary principle as the one I suggested that Kuper is implicitly appealing to: the claim that we ought to judge America's friends more harshly than others. That principle, or something like it, is needed to explain how America's support for Israel can act as a justification for judging the latter by a more punitive standard. But that principle is itself in urgent need of justification, and if we can't accept it (as I can't myself) then the justification for singling out Israel collapses. To rescue it, Kuper needs to provide some other principle which will bridge that logical gap, and in his response he doesn't do so.
In his reply to the objections I raised Kuper seems to have lost sight of the fact that the singling-out problem is a comparative one: it's about harsher treatment for one country's misdeeds compared to gentler treatment for other countries' much greater misdeeds. Those who object to Israel being singled out for hostile treatment don't want to deny its misdeeds, what they want to know is why its misdeeds loom so large in the field of vision of the boycotters, when the far greater oppression and massacres of others get only the most cursory attention. It's a motes and beams problem: Israel seems to be an intolerable irritant in the eyes of a section of the left whose vision remains relatively undisturbed by Sudan and North Korea and China and Russia and Zimbabwe and Syria and Iran. They owe us an explanation for this, and it's to Kuper's credit that he tries to pay this explanatory debt. But neither the appeal to our own longing for moral purity, nor the emphasis on American support for Israel, provides us with anything like an adequate answer to the question that he originally set out to address. (Eve Garrard)