Barry Mahmoud graduates from high school in Clifton in June. And he’s already setting his sights on a career in public service.
“I want to be the mayor of Clifton one day,” Mahmoud, 17, told NJ Advance Media.
He’s spent much of his youth involved in community affairs, volunteering for the Palestinian American Community Center (PACC) in his hometown for the last seven years, assisting with programing like voter registration drives, Dabke (folk dance) classes and cultural events.
Mahmoud’s Palestinian-American identity is central to who he is. Simply put, it makes him proud, he said.
“My parents have always been encouraging of maintaining our culture, maintaining our heritage,” Mahmoud said. “Since I was little, we’d go to protests in the area or in New York City...my parents would always educate me on what is happening back home. We would go to Palestine every other year.”
Mainstream news coverage of recent violent confrontations in Gaza have shone a renewed spotlight on the deeply-rooted conflict in the Middle East. But Mahmoud, and other members of the PACC, said they are always engaged in these conversations, even when it seems the rest of the world moves on.
“We’re trying to make those connections. The history is really important, because the history reminds us that this isn’t new, this has been happening for 73 years,” said Abire Sabbagh, Community Engagement Coordinator at the PACC. “It’s just on an escalated level right now, and on a large platform, like social media, which is a good thing, because that’s a tool to raise more awareness about it.”
The PACC opened at 388 Lakeview Avenue in Clifton in 2014, after community members identified a need for a non-partisan, non-religious space to share their culture.
“(When we first started) we had a lot of different people coming in and saying, ‘we need a tutoring program, we need Palestinian education, we need more understanding of civic engagement,’” said PACC Executive Director Rania Mustafa.
Although she was born and raised in Passaic County, a place like PACC is important, Mustafa said, because affirming her identity and being her unapologetic self comes with its challenges — challenges many Palestinian-Americans face, she said.
“It’s my constant struggle. It really is. I really struggle with this because I know the second I walk into a room, especially because I wear the headscarf, people are making assumptions about me,” Mustafa said.
But the PACC is a place many call home, whether they’re attending programming in one of of the center’s spacious conference rooms, or helping out with COVID-19 relief.
Recent pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Passaic County have drawn support from people of many walks of life, including members of the local Black Lives Matter movement.
“I think there’s the grassroots spirit of mutual aid, that the pandemic left us no choice but to rely on each other because it exposed the faults of the government and how much we need to rely on other communities, especially other oppressed communities,” Sabbagh said. “Marginalized communities who understand what is happening because they can relate to it, and they go through it.”
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Tennyson Donyèa may be reached at tcoleman@njadvancemedia.com.
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