During a demonstration in the course of the "No Border Camp" in Strasbourg, France (July 19-28), an incident occured at the local synagogue which has become the primal interest in most left-wing media coverage of the camp.

We can not really clear up the event about which so many rumors go around now. How many demonstrators headed for the synagogue, if they "only" were out to get the surveillance cameras that were attached there or if they wanted to put a graffiti on the wall, if they did it out of thoughtlessness or, as reported by an eyewitness, if they were following their convictions of israel being "a fascist state" and the synagogue one of its branch offices, we do not know.

We do know that it came to a tense situation at the synagogue. Even for those of us who were there it remained unclear, and it seems to stand symbolically for the confused position of left-wing and social movements towards anti-semitism. The relief at the stepping in of some demonstrators, who had the presence of mind to prevent worse things, can not make forgotten that they had to intervene at all. That there has not been a detailed clearing up of the occurence nor consequences is a political failure of the camp, which had at that time fallen into hectic activism in response to french police repression.

At the same time we reject all reports saying the incident at the synagogue expresses the camp's true nature. An article in the "Jungle World" (left-wing weekly / the translator) for example, whose author was not there, described the camp as a crowd of esoteric enemies of civilization howling at the moon and shitting into holes, who could be thought capable of anything bad. Some indymedia articles are even more denouncing, talking about "latent ant-semitism" at the camp and taking the synagogue incident as a reason to declare the left in general anti-semitic.

All these reproaches of anti-semitism do a disservice to the struggle against anti-semitism and its variations within the left. Our experiences at the camp were different: two events about anti-semitism in France and in the left just at the beginning of the camp were really remarkable because they lacked the usual agitation against Israel. Even before the camp had started, a paper had been released in Freiburg talking about this year's anti-semitic violence in france evolving also from the banlieus, which were an important theme at the camp.

That these initiatives had not been enough to emphasize a clear distance to anti-semitism became obvious in a most bitter way by the events during the demonstration and the lack of common reflection afterwards. In the future, we will have to continue the dealing with anti-semitism, especially on an international level. Dumb condemnations of the camp will lead to nothing.

No Border Plenum,
Freiburg, Germany
August 8 2002

(translation: Andreas Liese  druesenfieber@gmx.de )