Dear Carolynn

Author: Mark Bolton. Co-written: DeepSeek. Images: Sources below image.

Dear, Carolynn. I've been trying to write these thoughts for months, but I kept starting in the wrong place—listing facts, stacking arguments. It wasn't working. Then I realised the problem wasn't the facts. It was the framing.

So let me try this instead. Empathy. How I'd feel if it were me.

Imagine, for a moment, that I am a Jew. My name is Levi, I'm 65, grew up and live an anonymous life in New York City. I'm not the kind of Jew that politicians invoke as a shield, but a real one like the vast majority—gentle, kind, loving, hard working and a bit kooky in a good way. My grandparents fled pogroms. My great-uncle entered through a gate that had a sign above, Arbeit macht frei (Work Sets You Free). He never again left there. 

My name is Levi and I carry the names of my people who were some of the millions upon millions of Jews who didn’t or did survive a genocide because they were Jewish. Called The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

Now, I am watching television in 2026. I see a young woman, maybe twenty-two, holding a cardboard sign outside the White House, or a parliament somewhere in the world. She is protesting her own government’s complicity in the starvation of children in Gaza. She is not throwing stones. She is not shouting slurs. She is standing on public land, in public silence, with a public plea.

And I hear a congressman or a minister describe her as a modern-day Nazi.

I have heard commentators compare her placard to the yellow badge. I hear advocates for Israel declare the criticism of its military policy is morally indistinguishable from the rhetoric that preceded Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass).

And I think, is this what my grandparents survived the Holocaust for? The answer is, no. They didn’t survive so the Jewish people could have a state—that is not what they whispered in the ghettos—or a feeling of a lost opportunity as they made their way to the gas chambers or the massive hole in the ground. Those who lived to tell their stories survived because the Soviet Union’s Red Army crushed Hitler’s armies in the east and stormed Berlin, while the Western Allies liberated the death camps in the west.

They survived because of timing. In turn, the survivors shared with a horrified world that no one would again be told their death is the penalty for the crime of existing. They did not endure the Holocaust so that their grandchildren could preside over a military occupation of Gaza, nor so that the memory of ash and bone could be deployed to protect demolitions in the West Bank.

But this—this is something more. This is also the weaponisation of my own grief. Because if a woman holding a sign that reads “Ceasefire Now” is a Nazi, then what word remains for the men who shot my great-uncle in a ditch? If her placard is a swastika, then what do I call the actual swastikas still carved into synagogues in Berlin, in Paris, in Melbourne.

They have taken the worst thing that ever happened to my people and shrink-wrapped it for political convenience. They have made the Holocaust into a trump card—play it and the game ends. Criticism of Israel? Antisemitism. Boycott of settlement goods? Antisemitism. An elderly woman in London holding a Palestinian flag? Antisemitism, antisemitism, antisemitism.

And in doing so, they have drained the word of its true meaning.

I do not feel protected when a politician calls a student a Nazi. I feel diminished. I feel that the memory of the actual six million Jewish people during the Holocaust is being pickpocketed by lobbyists and press secretaries. I feel that the very specificity of what was done to us—the industrial, bureaucratic, methodical erasure of an entire people—is being dissolved into a general-purpose baton to be used against anyone who inconveniences an embassy.

And I wonder, are we Jews even allowed to say this? Because the other theft is this: they have also stolen the vocabulary of my dissent. To object to this weaponisation is to risk being told I am a self-hating Jew. That I am aiding the new Hitler. That I have forgotten history.

I have not forgotten, I never will and neither will my children and their children. Not only for our personal story, but for all humanity; that this should never happen again. But instead of arguing over the rights and wrongs of a systematic slaughtering of innocent people being held in a concentration camp called Gaza, the argument is about whether the mass-murdering of innocent men, women and children is a genocide or war. Whether it is a justified slaughter? As a result, those who argue there is no justification, that is those who believe in being a humanitarian are labelled antisemitic and therefore suffer consequences by their own political leaders, self-interest groups and media.

I watch governments all around the world—define advocacy for Palestinian human rights as “extremism.”

I watch universities in America purge academics who support BDS.

I watch the British Home Secretary threaten to revoke visas from foreign nationals who glorify terrorism. The phrase is broad. The power to use that phrase on anything it sees fit is real. And it has been applied—opaque, unspoken—to people whose only crime is sharing the words of a Palestinian poet, a Palestinian writer in Australia, or those standing in solidarity with the children in the scopes of Israeli snipers, and under bulldozers and bombs.

The governments rarely name them. That’s the point. However, you don’t need to see the knife to feel its edge.

And yet I notice that no such power has been deployed against the men named in three million of the six million pages of the Epstein documents. It almost feels like a cruel piece of satire that one document represents one Jew who died under the Nazi’s, yet the US government is only recognising three million of them.

No visas revoked for the billionaires who trafficked children.

No Home Secretary declaring that complicity in rape is incompatible with public good. There are no world governments pressuring the US to do the morally and legally correct thing, yet these same governments yield to Israel’s demands to oppress their citizens exercising their legal and moral rights in peaceful protests.

Only the poets. Only the protestors. Only the woman with the cardboard sign. Only the trafficked women. Only those who support the rights and dignity of the poets, protestors, the trafficked and the innocents being slaughtered are held to account. That is not counter-terrorism. That is fascism.

And I think they are building a definition. Not of Jew. But of enemy. Pigeonholing ordinary Jews as Israeli, which risks taking us back to 1925 when Hitler’s Mein Kampf  led to a collective hatred of Jews in Germany in particular. Only this time, the people who say they are protecting the Jews are the new authors of Mein Kampf. And they are using my grandparents’ bones as the foundation.

There is one other horrible truth that I must contend with; if there were smart phones and independent journalists in the 1930’s and ’40’s, nobody will have come to the aid of my ancestors if there was no World War 2. And then I learned about the Kimberley Plan.

1944. The Australian government was asked: should we allow Jewish refugees to establish a homeland here, in the sparsely populated north? The proposal was serious. The Freeland League had spent years advocating for it. Tens of thousands of lives might have been rerouted—not to Palestine, but to the Kimberley.

Australia said no.

I read the reasons and I had to stop reading. Not because they were unfamiliar. Because they were too familiar. The government did not say: this land belongs to the Aboriginal peoples and we will not dispossess them further. That would have been a moral argument. That would have been, in 1944, nearly unimaginable—and they did not imagine it.

They said: Jews do not assimilate. They are a separate race. They would form foreign communities, alien blocs. They might one day hold the balance of power in parliament.

They said: we want Australia to be devoid of foreign communities.

Devoid.

Australia was not protecting Indigenous land. It was protecting white British homogeneity. It was not rejecting settler colonialism. It was rejecting the wrong kind of settler.

And I thought: what if Australia had said yes? What if sixty thousand Jews had gone to the Kimberley in the 20’s and 30’s instead of Palestine in the late 40’s? Would my great-uncle be alive? Would my grandparents have died old, in a climate they never got used to, speaking English with accents their grandchildren would romanticise? Or would we have done there what we are doing to Gaza and the West Bank?

I am the grandson of refugees. I am also, by citizenship, by language, by the accident of my family’s survival and displacement, a member of a nation that now occupies the West Bank and bombs Gaza. I do not want this membership. I did not apply for it. But it was conferred upon me, and I cannot renounce it by signing a form.

And so I ask: if we had gone to Australia instead—if the land had been empty in the Australian imagination the way it was empty in the Zionist imagination—would there be Aboriginal Palestinians? Would there be a Kimberley Nakba? Would my cousins be guarding checkpoints on Wadjuk country, explaining to themselves that it was empty, it was undeveloped, it was given to us by an empire that had no right to give it?

Might this then expanded to small country towns? To regional Australia? To the cities? It’s not unreasonable to consider Australia may have become a Palestine—after all Israel currently has the Australian political branch, and law enforcement under its control.

I don’t know. I cannot know. Hypotheticals are where we go to avoid the weight of the actual. But I know this: Australia conducted a test in 1944. It was not a test of whether settler colonialism was just. It was a test of whether we European Jews were the correct white. We failed that test. And because we failed it, sixty thousand Jews went elsewhere.

And now I watch Israel, hiding behind Judaism—and became the government of the place they went instead of Australia—telling the world that to question its actions is to question a Jewish right to exist while removing the Palestinian’s right to live. That to mourn Palestinian children is to dance on Jewish graves.

Australia, did not save Jews out of righteousness. It excluded us out of prejudice. But in that exclusion, Australia inadvertently and likely saved itself from becoming Palestine.

As you know, Carolynn, the above is truth being told using creative licence. I do not know what it is like to be a Jew. I cannot wear that history. I too don't know what it is like to experience rape. Or the the terrifying moments before a living person becomes the victim of murder. But I can imagine it so I can try and understand for their sake. And when I try and imagine an ordinary, everyday Jew, I imagine a person watching all of this stuff unfold—the placards called swastikas, the students called Nazis, the grief pickpocketed and repurposed—and I'm left with an empathetic feeling of not being protected, but erased.

Not because the protesters hate Jews. Some do, but the majority do not. But because the memory of what actually happened to Levi's people has been turned into a public relations strategy.

And that is a second death.

I created Levi to tell this story, but I've no doubt that somewhere in the world there is a man named Levi whose grandparents survived the Holocaust and had a great-uncle who didn't, and Levi likely feels as though he is a pawn in a sick game.

In memory to all victims of genocides—former, current and future. In memory too of those at Bondi Beach, 15 lives taken; Christchurch mosque attack, 51 lives taken—and so many others.