Everyone Is Damaged

There is a back and forth between Jodi Dean and Judith Butler over language used by the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee following the Oct.7 attacks, which "contextualized" the slaughter of unarmed Israeli civilians. Butler critiqued the position and I agree with them. Dean felt the Committee deserved more solidarity. There are all the related isues of censorship and free speech but I want to ask does support for Palestinians necessarily imply support for Hamas? And is Hamas deserving of that support. But my real point is that both sides, Palestinians and Israelis, are so incredibly damaged by trauma and psychsocial dysfunction that rational debate will not lead to some "understanding". We have left the age of Habermasian discourse. These are dark times of unreason. By contextualized I mean a recourse to history meant to justify and excuse the violence, eg: decades of violent repression, displacement, targeted killings, etc...Certainly it is important to recognize the history of crimes perpertrated by the apartheid, Zionist ethno-state. And if an armed wing of Hamas had attacked IDF forces they would deserve not just our "understanding" but our full support. But they fucked up and instead indiscriminately killed civilians and that must be condemned. For the moral as well as strategic/tactical failure. Show me a case where terrorism was successful. Yes, Israel is being exposed for what it is. But Gaza is laid to waste and a whole generation murdered and further traumatized. The other point about "support for Hamas" is that they are a conservative, anti-communist Islamist movement. There politics suck and no one on the Left should want to see them in power. They are damaged by decades of oppression and violence and infighting orchestrated by Israel as well as twisted theology. As twisted as the theology espoused by the Zionist settlers and hard-right parties of Israel. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend in this case. Butler asks: "Why can’t we condemn morally heinous acts without losing our powers to think, to know and to judge? Surely we can, and must, do both." She is asking a lot of a world of damaged unreason.