Imagine if there were no more Jews in the world

“It was Saturday evening in Grenoble, France, during a festival that the city has been organising for 25 years,” writes Simone Rodan-Benzaquen in The Tablet. “But the crowd hadn’t come to dance. 150 people had turned up to stop her. Whistles, shouts, bottles thrown onto the stage. DJ Barbara Butch – Jewish, lesbian, a legendary figure in Parisian queer life – gave in and left. The last song she played before being forced off the stage was ‘Imagine’. John Lennon’s anthem to a world without religion or borders continued to play for people who had just demonstrated the exact opposite instinct: every utopia ultimately decides who does not belong there. The crowd that had gathered to greet her in Grenoble described themselves as anti-fascist. Its organisers accused her of complicity in ‘genocide’ because she had signed a petition in support of a French bill against anti-Semitism.

The boycott was called by the local branch of La France Insoumise, the radical left-wing party led by presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Allan Brunon, LFI’s chair on Grenoble City Council, had called for a ‘militant blockade’ of the concert. LFI activists distributed a leaflet showing Butch splattered with blood whilst DJing in front of a Pride flag bearing the Star of David, with the caption ‘Complice du génocide’ (‘Accomplice to genocide’). MPs led the crowd of people wearing keffiyehs and waving Palestinian flags. The following morning, the party’s coordinator, Manuel Bompard, went on the radio to explain that disrupting the concert was a legitimate act of political criticism. We often say that anti-Semitism is a shape-shifter, as if it merely changed its vocabulary over time. The remarkable thing about anti-Semitism is not that it evolves. It is that it travels. It migrates effortlessly between ideologies that otherwise define themselves precisely by their mutual hatred. It can speak the language of blood and soil or that of decolonisation. It can invoke Christ or human rights. Perhaps this is because anti-Semitism is less an ideology than a political reflex. Barbara Butch was not attacked because she was a conservative or a progressive – in fact, she was attacked precisely because she was a progressive. She was attacked because she was Jewish and refused to apologise for it. Although her case is not an exception, it serves as a warning.

Lennon’s call to ‘imagine there are no countries’ was never a call to erase differences. It was a call to imagine a world that no longer needed enemies. The angry protesters in Grenoble imagined something quite different. Theirs is a world in which everyone belongs – provided the ‘right’ people stay out. Barbara Butch happened to be there that evening. Next time it will be someone else. What happened in Grenoble was more than an act of anti-Semitism. It was a dress rehearsal for a political system in which moral certainty sanctions intimidation and ideological conformity replaces democratic pluralism. Every generation believes it would have recognised the mob. The real test is whether it recognises it when it proclaims itself to be anti-fascist.”

(Translated by Giulio Meotti)