New York City, United States – A metallic blur flashed past Khader Khalilia's ear. The bullet, so close he could hear it, slammed into a painting of Romeo and Juliet on the wall behind him.
As more gunfire rang out, Khalilia and her family fell to the ground in their home in Beit Jala, outside Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. Khalilia covered her younger brother Elios with her body to protect him. They were caught in the crossfire between the Israeli army and a Palestinian resistance group.
“I was cursing and praying at the same time,” Khalilia said, recalling that afternoon in 2003, when she was 23 and still a college student. “Then I said to myself: If we ever survive, I will come to serve you, Lord.”
It was a promise he would keep. Last year, Pastor Khalilia marked a decade leading Redeemer-St. John's Lutheran Church in Dyker Heights, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.
But over the past nine months, Israel’s war on Gaza has brought Khalilia’s identity as a Palestinian pastor into sharp relief. He is one of the few Palestinian religious leaders in New York City and, as far as he knows, the only one who leads a Christian church.
That visibility has required Khalilia to become something of an ambassador, dispelling misconceptions and educating New Yorkers about what it means to be Palestinian.
Some of the people he meets see his own identity – as a Palestinian Christian – as a contradiction: they believe that all Palestinians are Muslims.
“When I tell people I’m a Palestinian-American Lutheran Christian pastor, they get very confused. But I’m not really,” Khalilia said.
An inherent part of her life and work is dismantling harmful ideas about the Palestinian people, an Arab ethnic group that encompasses multiple religions, including Christianity, Islam and the Druze faith.
Khalilia is sometimes asked: “When did you become a Christian?” Her answer is always the same.
“I always tell them: ‘The day of Pentecost, 2,000 years ago.’ Two thousand years ago, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Palestine.” Christianity, he points out, has its roots in his homeland.
