Our Palestinian Grandchildren in 2026
I cannot mention my Palestinian-American grandchildren by name in this article. The fear of a backlash against Palestinians in the United States has made that impossible. In 2026, there is a genuine fear for my family, even though they are now American citizens.
My wife and I are the proud adopted grandparents of three children from Gaza. The eldest —- is a kind and mathematically gifted teenager. When we were in St. Petersburg last month, another kid wanted to play with his boogie board. Without being asked, he gave it to him. The youngest boy___ was born in the USA. The teenage girl___ is charming and funny. When our family first arrived, the fire alarm in our hotel triggered a state of panic. They cried. It reminded them of Gaza. In occupied Palestine, life is constant fear. These children will grow up without that terror. They will go to school without wondering if it will be bombed. However, now, with the destruction and killing of their family in Palestine, they are traumatized, and ask, “How can Israel and the USA do this while the world is silent?”
Their father — our son by heart — grew up in Gaza. He came into our lives as a scholarship student, a political refugee persecuted by both Hamas and Israel for the crime of being a humanist. He watched his father being beaten by Israeli soldiers. He survived the American invasion as a student in Iraq. His credo is love, tolerance, and justice for everyone — Muslim, Christian, Jew, nonbeliever. I have never met a more resilient human being.
I am a Jew by heritage, shaped by many religions and philosophies. I lived in Seville as a child in the 1950s, surrounded by a city forged by Moorish civilization. For seven centuries, while other European countries persecuted Jews, the Moors welcomed us. In 1492, with the Reconquest, Muslims and Jews were expelled together, their property seized. The Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II rescued 150,000 Jews with his own navy and told the Spanish royalty: Your loss is my gain.
Until 1948, Jews and Muslims lived in Palestine and throughout the Middle East as neighbors. Unlike Europe — where Jews were persecuted, ghettoized, and ultimately annihilated — Jews were welcomed and protected throughout the Islamic world. It is a tragic irony that Palestinians now suffer the same apartheid, the same expulsion, the same erasure that we Jews endured in Europe. At Passover we remember the bitterness of slavery and exile. The question that keeps me awake: how can a people who suffered so much inflict the same suffering on others?
We welcomed our Palestinian family to the United States in the same spirit with which Sultan Bayezid once welcomed our ancestors. Marhaba. Welcome. In honor of my grandparents, who fled the pogroms of Europe with nothing, we care for these children and work for a just peace — for the children of Palestine and Israel both.
Our dream is simple. To travel one day together as a family to a free Palestine.
bio: Namaya is a poet, artist, multimedia artist and with his partner Zoe create peacebuilding projects globally
