Drive south on Harlem Avenue past the strip malls and the prairie subdivisions, and somewhere around 159th Street the signs begin to change. A halal butcher here, a bakery selling knafeh there, a law office with Arabic lettering beside the English. This is the leading edge of one of the largest Palestinian communities in the United States, and Tinley Park, Illinois sits squarely inside it. By the 2020s the Palestinians in Tinley Park numbered more than thirteen hundred, a community that arrived not by accident but by a chain that runs all the way back to a single hillside town outside Ramallah.
The Place
Tinley Park is a village of roughly 55,000 people straddling the line between Cook and Will counties, a southern suburb of the Chicago metropolitan area about 25 miles from the Loop. It is comfortable rather than glamorous: a place of brick ranch houses, well-kept lawns, and a median household income above $100,000.
The village grew up around the railroad. Founded in 1853 as Bremen to honour its German settlers, it was renamed in 1890 for Samuel Tinley Sr, the first agent at the local railway depot, and incorporated in 1892. The Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific line still runs through the centre, and two Metra stations carry commuters north every morning. Its downtown clusters along Oak Park Avenue, anchored by a stone-and-slate station with a three-story clock tower.
For most of its history Tinley Park was a German and Irish and Polish town. The Palestinian presence is recent, a story of the last forty years rather than the last hundred, and it has changed the texture of the place in ways the founders could never have imagined.
How It Became Palestinian
To understand why Palestinians settled in Tinley Park, you have to start with where they came from, and the answer is unusually specific.
One Town Outside Ramallah
The preponderance of Chicago’s Palestinians trace their roots to Beitunia, a town roughly eight miles outside Ramallah in the central West Bank, together with the adjacent cities of Ramallah and Al-Bireh. Historians of the community describe Beitunia as the single largest feeder village of Palestinian immigration to Chicago.
The first arrivals came early. Arabs from the region that includes modern Syria, Lebanon and Palestine began trickling into Chicago around the time of the 1893 World’s Fair, working as peddlers and small grocers. But the real movement came in waves tied to catastrophe and occupation.
The displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 sent one wave. The 1967 war and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza sent another. From the late 1960s onward, extended families from the Ramallah area sought refuge by joining relatives already established in Chicago.
From the Black Belt to the Suburbs
The earliest Palestinian families in Chicago settled and worked on the city’s South and South-West Sides, often running corner grocery stores in the predominantly Black neighbourhoods of the Black Belt. That commercial niche, the family-run shop, became the foundation for everything that followed.
The Gulf War of 1990 and 1991 brought a further influx, as Palestinians exiled from Kuwait looked to the established Chicago networks. By then the community had reached a size where it could move outward. In the 1980s, families had already started leaving the city for the inner south-west suburbs: Burbank, Oak Lawn, Hickory Hills, Bridgeview, Alsip and Palos Hills. Bridgeview, with its mosque founded in the 1950s and built up in 1981, became the recognised hub, the place outsiders call Little Palestine.
Pushing South to Tinley Park
By the 1990s the movement had gathered pace, and it pushed steadily south and west, following Harlem Avenue out of the city. As families prospered, as the corner-store generation sent its children to university and into medicine, law and engineering, they sought larger houses and better schools further from the centre.
Tinley Park, Orland Park and Oak Lawn were the natural next step. They offered the space and the school districts that an immigrant community climbing into the middle class wanted, while keeping families within reach of the mosques, markets and relatives anchored back in Bridgeview.
The pattern is visible in the schools. High School District 230, whose three campuses include Victor J. Andrew High School in Tinley Park, came to hold the single largest concentration of Arab American students in the region, drawing from Tinley Park, Orland Park, Palos Hills and Bridgeview alike.
That concentration was not always met with grace. In the 1990s, by one account, roughly 90 percent of student expulsions across District 230’s schools involved Arab students, though they made up less than 10 percent of a student body of around 6,000. Over the following decades the district shifted toward recognising Eid al-Fitr and adding Arabic instruction.
The clearest marker of that shift came in 2021. On 1 July, the District 230 board unanimously hired Abir Othman as principal of Andrew High School, making her the first Arab American public high school principal in Illinois. Othman had immigrated as an elementary school child, taught at the Universal School in Bridgeview, and spent eighteen years in the district before reaching the top job at a school her own community had filled.
Cook County now holds more Palestinians than any other county in the United States, a fact documented by WBEZ. Census figures count over 18,000 in the county and more than 23,000 across the metropolitan area, though community leaders and researchers put the true number far higher, in the range of 70,000 to 100,000 once chronic undercounting is accounted for. Within that landscape, Tinley Park became one of the principal residential anchors.
Palestinian families in Paterson, New Jersey, the other great American hub, came largely from different villages; the south-west Chicago suburbs are, above all, Beitunia and Ramallah in exile.
The Landmarks
Victor J. Andrew High School, 9001 W 171st Street, Tinley Park. One of the three campuses of District 230, Andrew sits at the heart of the area’s Arab American student population. In 2021 it gained Abir Othman as principal, the first Arab American to lead a public high school in Illinois, a milestone for a community that had spent decades fighting to be recognised inside its own classrooms.
The Prayer Center of Orland Park, 16530 104th Avenue, Orland Park. Founded in 2004 and built out steadily since, this is the principal mosque and community centre for Muslim families across the southern reaches of the suburbs, including Tinley Park. Its members come from Tinley Park, Orland Park, Mokena, Frankfort and New Lenox, and it runs schooling alongside daily prayer.
The former Arbury Hills School, Mokena. In July 2024 the Prayer Center bought the shuttered Arbury Hills School building from Summit Hill District 161 for $1.9 million, with plans to run early-childhood classes and adult education teaching English and Arabic. Board member Mohammed Nofal noted that many members live in Tinley Park, a sign of how far the community has spread south.
Al Jazeerah Food Market, Orland Park. A Middle Eastern grocery that opened in 2021, stocking the Arabic staples that Tinley Park families once had to drive to Bridgeview to find. Its arrival marked a quiet milestone: the market following the families rather than the families following the market.
Zwar and Haifa, 9328 W 159th Street, Orland Park. A cluster of Arab restaurants along 159th Street, minutes from Tinley Park’s western edge, serving the Levantine cooking, grills, mezze and sweets, that anchors family gatherings and holidays for the surrounding Palestinian households.
Zabrocki Plaza, 17375 S Oak Park Avenue, Tinley Park. The civic heart of the old downtown, beside the historic Metra station, named for a long-serving mayor. It hosts the downtown farmers market and summer concerts, the shared public ground where the village’s older German-Irish-Polish stock and its newer Palestinian neighbours cross paths.
The American Arab Chamber of Commerce, serving the south-west suburbs. The chamber that organises and honours the Arab business community across Tinley Park, Orland Park and beyond holds its annual Best of the Best dinner at the Orland Civic Center, recognising the doctors, lawyers and shopkeepers who built the suburban Palestinian economy.
Where They Came From
Almost every thread leads back to the same small patch of the West Bank. Beitunia, the town outside Ramallah, supplied more Palestinian immigrants to Chicago than any other single place, and its families fanned out across the south-west suburbs in such numbers that researchers describe the Ramallah area as highly over-represented in the region.
Alongside the Muslim families of Beitunia came Christians from Ramallah itself, an older strand of the same migration. The result is a community defined less by a country in the abstract than by a handful of named towns, where a Tinley Park family at a wedding can often place a stranger by asking which village their grandparents left.
What drew them was not Tinley Park specifically but Chicago, and then the gravity of relatives already there. Chain migration did the rest, and the West Bank hill towns reassembled themselves, street by street, in the suburbs south of the city.
Tinley Park Today
Today the Palestinian community in Tinley Park is established rather than emerging. Census estimates count roughly 1,359 Palestinians in the village, about 2.47 percent of the population, second only to the city of Chicago among Illinois municipalities, and local figures put Palestinian ancestry among the largest in the village.
It is a community that has moved decisively into the middle class. The corner-grocery generation gave way to a professional one: the families that fill Andrew High School send their children to university and into the same medicine, law and engineering careers that mark suburban success everywhere. The signs in Arabic along Harlem and 159th are now as likely to belong to a dental practice as a bakery.
The Gaza war that began in late 2023 fell hard here. Many Tinley Park families have relatives in the West Bank and Gaza, and the south-west suburbs became a centre of rallies, vigils and political organising. The community that once fought simply to be acknowledged in its classrooms now sends its members into elected office.
The story of the Palestinians in Tinley Park is best read on the ground: in the halal aisle of a suburban grocery, in the tatreez embroidery worn at a high school ceremony, in the steady southward drift of mosques and markets following families who keep arriving. Other communities have layered into the same suburbs, the Greeks of nearby Oak Lawn and the Greeks of Palos Hills among them, but along this stretch of Harlem Avenue the Palestinian story is the dominant one.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Palestinians live in Tinley Park, Illinois?
Census estimates from the American Community Survey count roughly 1,359 Palestinians in Tinley Park, about 2.47 percent of the village’s population. That makes Tinley Park the second-largest Palestinian population among Illinois municipalities, behind only the city of Chicago itself.
Where did the Palestinians in Tinley Park come from?
Most trace their roots to Beitunia, a town about eight miles outside Ramallah in the central West Bank, along with the neighbouring cities of Ramallah and Al-Bireh. Beitunia was historically the single largest feeder village of Palestinian immigration to Chicago, and chain migration carried its families into the south-west suburbs.
Why did Palestinians move to Tinley Park and the south-west suburbs?
The earliest families settled on Chicago’s South-West Side, often running grocery stores. As they prospered through the 1980s and 1990s they moved outward along Harlem Avenue for larger homes and better schools, while staying near the mosques and markets of Bridgeview. Tinley Park, Orland Park and Oak Lawn were the natural next step south.
Is there a mosque serving Tinley Park’s Palestinian community?
The Prayer Center of Orland Park, founded in 2004 at 16530 104th Avenue, is the principal mosque and community centre for Muslim families across the southern suburbs, including Tinley Park. In 2024 it expanded by purchasing the former Arbury Hills School in Mokena to run education programmes for the growing community.
Why are so many Arab students at Andrew High School in Tinley Park?
Victor J. Andrew High School is part of District 230, which holds the single largest concentration of Arab American students in the region. In 2021 the school made Abir Othman its principal, the first Arab American public high school principal in Illinois, reflecting how central the Palestinian community has become to Tinley Park.
What is Little Palestine and is Tinley Park part of it?
Little Palestine refers to the corridor of Palestinian homes and businesses concentrated along Harlem Avenue in the south-west suburbs, centred on Bridgeview. Tinley Park sits at the southern, suburban edge of that broader community, one of its principal residential anchors rather than its commercial core.
If your family’s story passed through Tinley Park, or any of the places Palestinians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hillside town outside Ramallah, to a brick house on a quiet Tinley Park street, to wherever you are now.