Former Selling Sunset star Maya Vander has revealed she is receiving ‘a ton of hate’ and is preparing to lose clients after voicing her support for Israel, as she opened up about her fears for her family living in constant danger in her homeland.
In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, the reality TV star confirmed that her mom, brother, cousins, and nieces, have been hiding in ‘safe rooms’ to escape rockets, and also revealed that she feels ‘less optimistic’ about peace being achieved.
Maya, 41, has been vocal about the ‘terrifying’ situation on Instagram and has posted several videos since the October 7 Hamas terror attack, which saw around 1,200 people slaughtered – including children – and hundreds of Israelis kidnapped and held hostage after being taken to Gaza.
‘What’s been going on in the world, it’s terrifying,’ she told DailyMail.com. ‘I think it’s just a lot of hate. I’m a Jewish person and seeing all this hate against Jewish people…
‘I mean, you don’t have to agree with certain things that the Israeli government is doing, but people that are denying stuff that happened to us on October 7, that’s unacceptable.
Selling Sunset star Maya Vander has received ‘a ton of hate’ for defending Israel
Maya, 41, revealed that her mother (pictured) sometimes has to hide in ‘safe rooms’ in Israel
The TV favorite has been vocal about the ‘terrifying situation’ and revealed that as a result she has lost Instagram followers and could lose real estate clients
‘People that are justifying a terrorist organization and calling them “freedom fighters”, that really gets under my skin because I grew up in Israel and I grew up with terror my whole life.’
Maya has been vocal in encouraging people on Instagram to ‘check your facts’ before voicing opinions on the current unrest, claiming Palestinians are ‘victims’ of a terror organization and would be ‘happy’ if Israel destroyed Hamas.
She admitted it has been ‘a very intense’ time, but said that despite being Jewish, she’s not ‘trying to be an activist’ and argued that ‘people who go to Columbia University or Harvard and raise the flag without even knowing the history and the conflict’ are simply ‘very ignorant.’
She was referring to protests held by Harvard pro-Palestinian groups back in October, in which students marched from Harvard’s main campus in Cambridge to its business school in Boston.
Maya, who was born and raised in Israel by her Jewish mother and Dutch father, revealed she was never able to ride a bus in Tel Aviv because she was ‘always afraid that someone was going to explode [it].’
The real estate agent now resides in Miami with her husband Dave Miller and their children, Aiden, four, Elle, three, and six-month-old Emma, but her mother remains in Israel.
‘I have my mom, my brother, my cousins, my nieces, everybody lives in Israel,’ Maya explained in the interview which took place days before the ceasefire. ‘They’ve been getting rockets, and nobody talks about Israel getting over 10,000 rockets…
‘Everybody is only talking about what the Israeli military are doing in Gaza, but a lot of the media doesn’t show why we are even in Gaza.’
When asked if she would prefer her family to come and stay with her in the US, Maya replied: ‘I told them to come and spend time here until things calm down, but in Israel people are so strong. They’re like, “we have our work here, we have our routine here, we can’t just leave”.
‘They feel also this obligation to stay for their country. Every place in Israel – if it’s a new construction – has this safe room that you have to run [to] once you have a rocket. I was just talking to my mom and she was like, “Oh, I’m in the safe room because we just heard sirens and a lot of booms”.’
Maya’s brother (pictured) lives in Israel too, along with her nieces and her cousins
The Israeli-born star found fame on the hit Netflix reality series Selling Sunset, from 2019
Maya resides in Miami with her husband Dave Miller and their children: Aiden, four, Elle, three, and six-month-old Emma
Maya went on to stress that ‘people don’t know the truth’ about what’s really happening and admitted: ‘This is a very complex situation. I’m less optimistic unfortunately when it comes to peace and all that. Hamas don’t care about the civilians, that’s the truth. They do not care about the Palestinian people.
‘If you really think about it, if Israel really, really wanted to cause some terrible wars that cause genocide and all that, they could really go into Gaza and demolish Gaza in like five minutes. And they don’t, they’re trying to do whatever they can, but again, it’s a war and it’s not easy because they shoot rockets below tunnels, that’s a fact.’
The reality TV star certainly isn’t going to back down when it comes to speaking out and predicted that she will ‘probably lose clients’ by doing so.
‘I do real estate and it’s important to me, but I think that there are more important things in life and you know what, if I lose followers, maybe I will then gain a few more,’ she said.
‘I grew up very open minded to all cultures, religions, colors. I don’t see people by their beliefs. We never learned to hate… I never took a class in Israel where they taught me to hate Arabs, like never in my life, never.’
