From Bethlehem to the Big Apple: An Arab American’s historic run for New York City Council
AMMAN: It was in a cold and small Israeli prison cell that Khader El-Yateem received his calling.
“I was arrested arbitrarily from our home by Israeli soldiers and was being accused of belonging to the communist party,” El-Yateem said in an interview with Arab News.
Although a number of his family members were active with the then-outlawed Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian Communist Party, El-Yateem was never a member.
Alone and without the ability to connect with anyone in the outside world, El-Yateem turned his heart to the Almighty.
“I made a short prayer, I prayed to God to help me and made a commitment to be God’s servant if I was to survive the ordeal,” he said.
Never in his wildest dreams did El-Yateem think that he would not only be released from jail, but that he would become pastor of a church of Arab Christians in the US — and, more recently, the first Palestinian or Arab American to run for a seat on the New York City Council.
Rev. El-Yateem, born in the Palestinian town of Beit Jala near Bethlehem in 1968, is competing for the seat currently held by Vincent Gentile, who has represented the 43rd District for more than 13 years, and who cannot run again in this year’s election due to a term limits.
El-Yateem made the announcement he would enter the race in February to a crowd full of supporters at the Le Sajj Lebanese restaurant in New York.
One month after making his short prayer in the Israeli prison, El-Yateem — one of two boys and four girls born to parents Naim and Janette — decided to check out the nearest seminary.
“My father, who at the time was making olive-wood Nativity sets, had known Bishara Awad, the president of the Bethlehem Bible College, who had been a godfather to my sister.”
El-Yateem would soon attend a two- year course, in which he gained a perspective on the relationship between faith and nationalism.
“What I learned at the Bethlehem Bible College was that faith does not negate love of the homeland,” he said.
Awad had been associated with the Mennonites in Palestine, and was able to steer the newly established college toward a progres- sive understanding of issues of peace and justice.
El-Yateem learned more about Christian liberation theology, and would rub shoulders with Palestinian- Christian thinkers who felt they needed to develop a theology of the land that counters the right-wing Christian Zionist ideology that justifies Israel’s occupation.
El-Yateem would continue his BA studies in Egypt’s Evangelical Theological Seminary. After graduation in the spring of 1992, he met Grace George, a PalestinianAmerican nurse who had come to volunteer with the US medical charity Operation Smile.
The two married in December 1992 and traveled to the US. El-Yateem applied for the Masters of Divinity program at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, near where George’s family was living.
It was shortly after his graduation and ordination as a Lutheran pastor that El-Yateem would land in the southern Brooklyn area. The bishop of the Lutheran Church in New York had noticed a demographic change in the area.
Gone were many Scandinavian immigrants from areas like Bay Ridge; instead Middle Eastern Christians were moving into the area.
El-Yateem was assigned to the area and was granted to shepherd the Salem Lutheran Church in Bay Ridge.