The city of Resistencia - located about 1000 kilometers northwest of Buenos Aires - is the capital of Argentina’s Chaco province. On Thursday night it was the scene of an antisemitic demonstration.

A march through the city by about 50 members of the Túpac Amaru social movement in protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza ended with graffiti being painted on the Asociación Israelita de Beneficencia building, the city’s most important Jewish centre. Miguel Chamorro, identified in the story as a “human rights activist”, chained himself to the gates of the building during the protest. Graffiti was also painted on the Jewish community’s synagogue and school.

Mario Jaraz, a local Jewish leader reacted to the demonstration by saying “Everyone has the right to express their ideas but institutions have to be respected and those that belong to the Jewish community in Resistencia don’t belong to the state of Israel. We are Argentines of the Jewish religion and we want to be respected as such.”

Some will respond by saying that this is a non-story about a non-event, just slogans painted on a few buildings, not exactly the end of the world. I don’t agree. In a province with some of the nation’s gravest social problems and with a large indigenous community, the bulk of which lives in conditions of abject poverty, at least one small planet in the vast constellation of the country’s social and human rights organizations decided last Thursday night that of all the problems with which the world is afflicted, the most urgent is Gaza and that the best contribution it could make to resolving it was to harass the tiny Jewish community of Resistencia.

In many ways it’s more worrying than last Tuesday’s much larger protest outside the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, a vast city whose dark political and social humors are in a nearly constant state of agitation. The idea is taking hold in some very remote places that every Jew is jointly and severally responsible for the actions of every other. That should be of concern to everyone, whatever they think of Israel’s recent actions in Gaza.