What to do to fight against hatred? “Go and see the reality of fascism,” responds Rachid Zeroual, leader of the main group of supporters of the Olympique de Marseille football club (south-east of France), who took young people to the camp with a rabbi. Thousands.
This rabbi, Haïm Bendao, admits that he had “a bit of a knot in his stomach” when he arrived with these sixty South Winners supporters, aged 15 to 25, in this former tile factory located near Aix-en-Provence. (25 km from Marseille) which was a French internment camp during the Second World War before the deportation of around 2,000 Jews.
But very quickly, the agility of the mediator accompanying the group causes the jokes to flow and he slips: “It’s beyond my hopes”, the supporters manage to “come out of the worst with a smile”.
“And if I started making racist remarks, what would you do?” asks the mediator. “I would question you: +why do you say that?”, one responds. “We have to go into a debate to show him his faults,” says another.
“And what are the risks of doing that?”, she asks them. “Nothing!” respond the young people, realizing that there is no small act of resistance.
And everyone bursts out laughing when one of the elders asks if he can come to blows, like the Winners did in the 80s to chase away the “faschos from the stadium”.
“If there is a group that stood out, that fought against the rise of fascism in the stadiums, it’s us,” reminds them in his gravelly voice Rachid Zeroual, figure of the South Winners, the group with 7,500 members who ignite the southern bend of the legendary Vélodrome stadium in Marseille.
Today, he hopes that “they will have a blast” in this memorial site to realize the “reality” of fascism, in the context of the rise of the extreme right in France and the anti-Semitic acts following the conflagration in the Middle East after the unprecedented attack by Hamas against Israel on October 7, 2023 and the very deadly Israeli reprisals in Gaza and Lebanon.
“I don’t want it to get out of hand and I was afraid that it would land in Marseille, that young people would kill each other over stories that are distant and in which, in fact, they understand nothing.”
The port city, which welcomed waves of exiles from Armenia, Italy and the Maghreb, today has Jewish and Muslim communities among the largest in France.
OM supporter groups have always displayed strong anti-racism values but “when traveling, we are confronted with groups who have fascist ideals, we see Nazi salutes”, says Jules Sitruk, 26 years old.
Mohamed-Ali Ahmaidi, 21, said he was “touched” to cross the paths of the camp, icy on this day of the mistral (a dry wind coming from the north), and to imagine the internees sleeping on this red clayey and dusty ground where everyone was coughing and spitting blood.
“You shouldn’t always believe what you see, especially on the networks, on the phones. It’s very important to know what happened,” he believes. For him, in the stadium we must be able to continue to “eat together, have a drink”, without forgetting above all what “each can bring to the other”.
“Communitarianism is more and more present because people no longer live together,” says Emmanuel Cayo, 26 years old.
Living together, an obsession among the South Winners who have been increasing initiatives since October 7, 2023 to avoid an importation of the conflict.
“What if we exported peace instead?”, smiles Haïm Bendao, matching black yarmulke and t-shirt and khaki jacket, who has been working in the northern districts of Marseille for 25 years and is a figure in interreligious dialogue in the city.
In January, they will debrief this visit. “I want what needs to be said violently or not violently to be said (…) I want to get to this discussion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and not mix everything up,” he hopes.
“If it changes one out of the 60, it’s still a win. And it will make a lot of people think,” concludes Rachid Zeroual.