Palestinian moms and a Jewish grandmother gathered in Brooklyn on Wednesday to urge Vice President JD Vance to check in on their West Bank families during his trip to Israel, where a truce in the Gaza Strip is threatened by increasing violence.
While Vance met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian mother Najla Khass met with the daughter of a Holocaust survivor in a joint plea for peace and protection.
“Just recently, Israel broke the ceasefire, and our vice president, for me, remains silent,” Khass said. “As we speak, Palestinians are being deprived of everything, deprived of food, deprived of education, the right to live, and even the basic recognition of the value of their lives. My family is now reduced to skin and bones. My family went from somewhat healthy to skin and bones.”
Khass, who founded The House of Hope, a safe house on Staten Island for Palestinian children displaced by the war in Gaza, was joined at a news conference by Susan Braverman, 81, a grandmother who is a daughter of a parent who survived the Holocaust.
She said she was worried that the fighting might lead to a repeat of history.
“Israel’s violence against the Palestinians must stop,” Braverman said. “What Israel is doing is a holocaust. Our tax money should not be sent to kill children. It breaks my heart.”
Khass said she is worried about children who have been set back by a loss of education infrastructure.
“They’ve lost scholarships, they’ve lost opportunities,” she said. “They’ve lost everything, and the reason why they’ve lost all that is because they are locked in an open-space prison.”
She said many many students lost the opportunity to study abroad.
“I do have a cousin that was accepted to Staten Island College in the U.S., but he can’t leave Gaza,” Khass said. “He needs a permit from Israel to leave the borders, but everything is on pause. He’s lost semester after semester. Many students have lost opportunities to study abroad — in Germany, Ireland, Poland — because they are not allowed to leave.”
They said Vance shouldn’t only be meeting with Israelis.
“Where are the meetings with Palestinians?” said Yasmeen, 39, a Palestinian mother, at the news conference. “I’m asking Vice President Vance to stop these Israeli lynch mobs.”
Vance, meanwhile, stressed that he was not in Israel to babysit the Gaza ceasefire.
“I never said it was easy,” Vance said. “But what I am is optimistic that the ceasefire is going to hold and that we can actually build a better future in the entire Middle East.”
