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Cairo would take a broader role in the economy and Israel would get “quiet.”
By JNS
Egypt is working on a “long-term truce” between terrorist factions in the Gaza Strip and Israel, the London-based The New Arab news site reported on Sunday.
The report comes several weeks after Cairo brokered an end to the brief war (“Operation Shield and Arrow”) between Israel and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group in Gaza and as the government of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi continues to play an active role in the affairs of the Strip, with which it shares a border.
According to Egyptian sources familiar with the mediation efforts, Cairo has conveyed the message that the senior Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials should attend the new round of talks in Cairo in person because “the leaders will be looking at highly sensitive files.”
One of the Egyptian sources told the pan-Arab news site that the meeting comes amid new international and regional understandings involving the United States, Qatar and Egypt that will “include broader roles for Cairo in terms of its presence in the Gaza Strip” and necessitate the direct involvement of the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
“There have been consultations during the last period between Egyptian and Iranian security officials regarding the situation in the Gaza Strip and the occupied territories, due to Tehran’s role in supporting Hamas and the Islamic Jihad,” the source said.
Another Egyptian source said the plan includes an expansion of trade with Gaza through the establishment in the Strip of a subsidiary port of Sinai’s el-Arish Port to be administered by Egypt.
It also includes a highway to be constructed linking Gaza with the city of el-Arish, the largest in the Sinai Peninsula. The highway would be used to transport goods from Gaza to the Egyptian port for export abroad and import into the Strip.
Also under discussion as part of the plan: Egypt supplying Gaza with electricity that would involve a large project starting at 100 megawatts and increasing from there in stages, possibly to 300 MW.
The final part of the plan involves exploiting the natural gas reserves off the Gaza coast.
According to the report, Egypt is hesitant to get involved in managing a port inside Gaza because Cairo would be held responsible by Israel and the international community if the port is used to bring weapons into the Strip. The Egyptians would therefore want a broad security role in the Strip that the Palestinian terrorist factions would not accept.
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The documentary Rabble Rousers covers the activists behind the Cooper Square community land trust. (New Day Films)
If you’ve been around housing movements in New York City, or the United States, or maybe anywhere, you have probably heard about a place called Cooper Square, where the people did the impossible: beat back the real estate speculators and aligned power brokers to take control of a piece of their neighborhood, creating permanently affordable social housing while supporting a flourishing arts infrastructure and a slew of small businesses.
A good number of people know that this happened; far fewer know how it happened. The new documentary film Rabble Rousers: Frances Goldin and the Fight for Cooper Square, which opens March 24 at the Firehouse Theater in Manhattan’s Chinatown, aims to change that.
Rabble Rousers tells the story of Cooper Square, a twelve-block section of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and its legendary lead organizer, Frances Goldin. The film takes viewers from Goldin’s youth in the 1920s to the day in 2012 when the Cooper Square Community Land Trust (CLT) and Mutual Housing Association formally took over the area’s land and buildings. It’s a long and complicated story to tell, and producing this film has been a labor of love from directors Kelly Anderson, Ryan Joseph, and Kathryn Barnier for over a decade.
Full disclosure: I’m biased. The directors are friends of mine. Some of the people interviewed have been my teachers and mentors, and many of the activists who speak in the film are colleagues who I’ve collaborated with on campaigns and educational projects. The first time I organized a protest I asked Frances Goldin to speak. So maybe it’s no surprise that I think this is a fantastic film that everyone with an interest in housing movements and grassroots planning should see. But my bias also means I’d be pretty pissed off if I felt the directors missed the mark – if the story they were telling didn’t line up with the history, or betrayed the true character of the people it presents. From my perspective, they nailed it.
Rabble Rousers does several things that will be notable to an audience of progressive planners. First, it tells the history of the struggle for Cooper Square from being slated for Urban Renewal demolition in the late 1950s to the formation of the community land trust, with plenty of attention paid to all the unpredictable forks in the road. The filmmakers tell the story through interviews with CLT organizers and members (including Goldin, Tito Delgado, Val Orseli, Gisela Jasmine Gomez, Amir Bey, Maria Torres-Bird) and connected scholar-activists (Frances Fox Piven, Tom Angotti, Ron Shiffman), archival footage, documents brought to life with animation, a helpful timeline, and plenty of character development. We see the community come together not just to oppose their own displacement, but to work with Walter Thabit — one of the cofounders of the Planner’s Network’s precursor organization, Planners for Equal Opportunity — to create their own alternate plan, premised on the idea that the people themselves could determine which structures should be saved, built, or demolished. The plan called for the city to use a “checkerboarding” strategy to house the neighborhood’s poor and working-class residents without displacement. They wanted the city to build public housing on a large vacant lot, move tenants from nearby decrepit housing into that development, tear down the bad old housing, rebuild it, move tenants from other nearby decrepit housing into that development, and repeat until everyone in the neighborhood had decent housing. They fought Robert Moses, Richard Nixon, and every mayor from Robert Wagner to Ed Koch until they reformulated their plan and won control of their buildings through a community land trust.
In the course of this telling, the film also demonstrates and explains key concepts that can often be confusing or overly abstract. This film is as good as anything at showing what CLTs and mutual housing associations are, how they work, why they keep an area affordable, and what it takes to win them. Rabble Rousers also helps demonstrate the relationship between complex socio-spatial processes like disinvestment, “planned shrinkage,” gentrification, and community control through a concrete, historically and geographically specific example.
The documentary also examines an important piece of political history that is not often a part of our discourse around community planning: the early relationship between the fight for public housing and the fight for CLTs. Cooper Square Community Land Trust is known best as a functioning example of this model of community land and housing stewardship. The CLT movement is sometimes thought of as distinct from the movement for public housing. In fact, it can be seen as a turn away from large-scale state ownership of land and housing and toward a smaller-scale vision of community control. But Rabble Rousers shows us that for the people who built the CLT, public housing was always Plan A. It was only after the Nixon administration put a moratorium on federal public housing construction and the city government entered into a fiscal crisis that the activists devised the CLT alternative. In other words, the activists didn’t give up on public housing, the state did. This subtle but crucial corrective is reason alone to watch this film.
Without control over the state and capital, it can only ever be local and partial.
The filmmakers don’t sugarcoat the way the CLT got the land and the funds to renovate their decaying buildings. According to Cooper Square veteran Val Orseli, realizing that they had built up “the power to block” but they didn’t “have the money to build,” they allowed the city to sell two large, vacant lots at the southern edge of the neighborhood — which were the cornerstones of the public housing “checkerboarding” strategy — to private developers to build luxury housing. In exchange, they got 25 percent affordability in those two new buildings, and more important, secured tens of millions of dollars from the city to bring their buildings up to code. Once the buildings were renovated, they were transferred over to the community in the form of a community land trust and a mutual housing association, with apartments selling for $250 each and never appreciating in exchange value. There is still more to this story — we aren’t told where people moved to while the city was fixing their apartments, and I’m pretty sure federal vouchers are also a part of Cooper Square’s financing strategy — but the filmmakers don’t shy away from the fact that while they won something incredible, there were real costs and trade-offs involved.
Finally, Rabble Rousers closes by pointing its audience to the future. As the credits roll, we see a new generation of activists organizing to establish East Harlem/El Barrio CLT, about five miles north of Cooper Square. We see tenant activist Raquel Namuche Pacheco organizing a building (sounding a lot like a young Frances Goldin), and Picture the Homeless member and activist Marcus Moore talking about Cooper Square’s inspiration (sounding a lot like a young Tito Delgado). By closing with its gaze on a new CLT struggle, the film reminds us why Cooper Square matters — not just for itself, but as an inspiration for popular movements near and far.
But the film also closes on a sober note: Cooper Square may be forever affordable, but what about all that surrounds it? Frances Fox Piven notes that “the harms done by Robert Moses shrink if you compare them to the harms done by Mayor Michael Bloomberg,” and urges us to view the Cooper Square story as two truths at once: a remarkable achievement, and also a drop in the bucket. This may not be the triumphant conclusion many viewers expect, given that Cooper Square is often treated — accurately! — as a historic victory over enormous odds.
If Rabble Rousers is the story of a victory in community planning and the CLT movement, it’s also a demonstration of those movement’s limits. Community-based planning is just that: community-based. Without control over the state and capital, it can only ever be local and partial. This is not anything the protagonists of this story don’t know already — Frances Goldin got into this movement via Communism, and while she left the party (or the party left her) she remained a radical and an internationalist to the end. Shortly before she died in 2020, when much of her memory had left her, I saw of video of her singing every word of “Der Internatsyonal” (“The Internationale” in Yiddish). She may have dedicated much of her time to a hyperlocal struggle, but she never took her gaze off of the wider world.
For those working in Goldin’s political lineage, the question this forces us to grapple with is: How do we engage in local struggle without losing sight of what lies beyond? What’s our theory of how local struggles relate to the rest of the world, and to the global capitalist system that structures our local politics? One can reasonably argue any of the following: that the demand to “scale up” local struggles is in fact a masculinist imposition on anything that works on a smaller scale; that a network of local projects can join together and take on the world; that we can do it all at once, and organize both local projects and global uprisings; or that the global is simply beyond the reach of our movements right now, and so we do what we can where we are.
Any of these are plausible responses, but we need some kind of theory to explain the duality Piven poses at the end of this film: the presence of Cooper Square, and the disappearance of much that once surrounded it. Watching Rabble Rousers should get us all thinking about what that answer might be.
In the closing moments of the film, Goldin says, “I think that fighting back is a very life-giving force.” She explains that organizing and protesting forced her to have hope and to keep going for over ninety years.
I’m forty. Some days my stockpile of hope is in short supply. I’m sure sometimes Frances Goldin felt the same way. But she didn’t quit, right up to her dying days. This film is a reminder that it may take fifty years, but victories do come. And the day after they come, there’s still a world to win.
Indian filmmaker Mrinal Sen at the Munich Filmfest in Munich, Germany, in 1990. (kpa / United Archives via Getty Images)
A hundred years have passed since the birth of Mrinal Sen, one of India’s most brilliant and prolific postwar filmmakers. He was born in Faridpur, a city in what is now Bangladesh but was, at the time of Sen’s birth in 1923, part of the British-ruled Bengal Presidency, a subdivision of the empire in India. In the forty-seven years (1955–2002) in which he was active, Sen produced twenty-eight kaleidoscopic feature films. Each ran roughshod over barriers of time and geographical space. Poverty, hunger, class struggle, anger, revolution, and middle-class complacency haunted his films.
With these subjects, Sen developed and unleashed a kinetic, hypermodern aesthetic. This cinematographic language combined filmed fiction with documentary and newspaper headlines, creating new ways of storytelling that went beyond classical Hollywood-style narrative. Sen’s innovativeness explains why he became popular in Europe, where the experimental films of Jean-Luc Godard and the fairy-tale-like parables of Éric Rohmer were all the rage, but not in the United States. The great Hollywood films of the postwar era focused on stories of individual triumph and embraced an act-based structure that Sen eschewed. While his contemporary Satyajit Ray, author of classics such as The Apu Trilogy (1955–59), Jalsaghar (1958), and Mahanagar (1963), worked masterfully within the confines of traditional cinema, earning him praise from establishment figures such as Martin Scorsese, and, eventually, an honorary Oscar, Sen continued to work on the margins.
As evidence, look no further than a scene from Sen’s anthology film, Calcutta 71 (1972). In one scene, the director takes us to a party full of uptown liberals waxing eloquent about India’s burning political issues in the 1970s: poverty, corruption, unemployment, and so on. Leading the pack is a political figure who laments about the 1943 Bengal famine, widely attributed to Winston Churchill’s policies, which claimed millions of lives. But, we learn, it was the famine that helped this person grow his business as a black marketeer. Later, this same profiteer drunkenly argues for revolution. Meanwhile, striking workers have forced his factories to sit idle. What, the scene forces us to ask, does politics mean to a middle class that can throw around the word revolution so casually while exploiting workers?
Leftist ideas and a concern for the oppressed masses made it hard for him to translate his cinema into something that a primarily middle-class theatergoing Bengali audience were comfortable with.
All the while a rock band performs live. The music is intercut with images of the famine and on-screen text: “unemployment, degeneration, hunger, betrayal of our ancestors.” Finally, the charade is interrupted by an explosion. From the darkness emerges the disembodied head of a communist activist who was shot dead by the police. He announces that he is dead before adding:
Can you guess why I am here? I have come to tell you that I know who murdered me. But I won’t tell you their names. I want you to find out who they are. You might experience discomfort in the process, but you will not stay so comfortable, so indifferent.
The roots of such storytelling lie in Sen’s past. Unlike Ray, Scorsese, and most great filmmakers, Sen came to filmmaking later in life. He was first an activist, then an intellectual, followed by a short stint as a film critic, after which he eventually managed to find a gig as a director.
Sen’s father Dineshchandra was a lawyer closely associated with Indian freedom fighters. His son had his coming of age as a student in the teeming metropolis of Calcutta, now Kolkata. There he witnessed firsthand the savagery of the Bengal famine. While riots and World War II raged on, Sen associated with the Communist Party’s cultural wing and locked himself up in the library. During the war years he discovered Rudolf Arnheim’s influential Film as Art and turned his attention to aesthetics and film theory. In 1945, Sen published the article “The Cinema and the People” in a magazine rolled out by the Indo-Soviet Friendship Society. By the early 1950s, his first book on cinema, about Charlie Chaplin, was out.
It would take Sen almost a decade and a half to really find his groove as a director. Leftist ideas and a concern for the oppressed masses made it hard for him to translate his cinema into something that a primarily middle-class theatergoing Bengali audience were comfortable with. It was only after the political ferment of the 1970s hit India, creating by a massive distrust in the state, rampant corruption, and the rise of militant communism, that Sen’s career took off. The tumult of the world brought out the best in him.
Sen’s most notable films in his early period include Baishey Shravana (1960), Akash Kusum (1965), and Bhuvan Shome (1969). Baishey Shravana literally means the twenty-second day of the Shravana month in the Bengali calendar, August 7, 1941, according to the Gregorian calendar — the day Rabindranath Tagore died. Sen upends the meaning of this day in Bengali cultural life by making it the wedding date of a doomed rural couple. Plagued by famine and extreme poverty, the man and woman drift apart until the latter decides to take her own life on the anniversary of their wedding.
In Akash Kusum, Sen turns to the story of an urban couple. A young man wants to get rich quick and conveniently falls in love with a rich woman. But this romance comes at a cost: the man feels compelled to present himself as a successful entrepreneur and fabricate a whole life story. The lies compound and eventually their weight becomes too much for him to bear. The film is typical of Sen’s oeuvre insofar as it depicts individuals caught in dilemmas that are the product of their contradictory ambitions. In one scene, a friend tells the protagonist, “Don’t you see how big business is dominating? You cannot make it as a small businessman. Those days are gone.” The hero disagrees: “Don’t talk like a communist.”
Among the film’s highlights is Sen’s use of freeze frames and still photographs. These experiments get intense in Bhuvan Shome, which ended up being a commercial success. Made in Hindi, a decision that guaranteed a wider market in India, the film is a quirky drama about a hoity-toity bureaucrat who rethinks his life after meeting a young rural woman. Although a gentle film by Sen’s standards, his most well-known techniques were born here: use of documentary footage, documentary-like narration and commentary, and animation, all interspersed with freeze frames.
The film’s success gave Sen leeway to make cinema as he pleased, just when Naxalism, a Mao-inspired militant guerilla movement, had taken off in Bengal before spreading to the rest of India in the 1970s. Sen figured he could use the skill set he had developed so far to become a chronicler of the movement. This led to his second period that resulted in the critically acclaimed Calcutta trilogy, which includes Interview (1971), Calcutta 71 (1972) and Padatik (1973).
In these films, Sen is at his most aesthetically footloose and politically blunt. Interview follows a young Bengali man’s daylong ordeal to find the right suit to wear for a job interview with a British company. When his traditional Bengali kurta and dhoti doesn’t impress his prospective employers, a kernel of revolutionary animosity develops in the hero. He hurls stones at a clothes shop and strips a mannequin of its suit.
Like Brecht, Sen insists on the theatricality of the whole performance and never lets the audience forget that they are watching something staged. When lead actor Ranjit Mallick, called Ranjit in the film, is confronted with a film magazine carrying a photo of himself, he turns to the camera and explains that he is in Mrinal Sen’s new film and points to the cinematographer K. K. Mahajan, who has his camera pointed back at Ranjit. Near the end of the film, an agitated Ranjit has to debate an unseen audience in the darkness about his attitude about the whole day. The effect is to prevent the viewer from falling into a passive consumerist relation to cinema and instead maintain a critical attention on what is happening before them.
Calcutta 71 is perhaps Sen’s most ambitious film. In it, he connects three stories about poverty and its dehumanizing effects on oppressed and oppressor alike. The first is set in an unspecified time, possibly in preindependence India, the second during the Bengal famine, and the third shows the postindependence generation’s simmering anger. All three stories collide in the fantastic aforementioned party sequence.
Sen was as much a brilliant humorist as his was a social critic. A wonderful sequence in Calcutta 71 involves a group of business owners revolting against the Communists, carrying banners reading “Rulers of the World Unite,” and play-acting armed violence while the audio track plays the sound of gunfire and bombing.
It is in the third film in the series, Padatik, that Sen starts to question the methods and achievements, if any, of the Naxalites. A young revolutionary finds shelter in the house of an affluent woman who secretly sympathizes with his politics. During his stay, he questions the dogmatic nature of the Naxalite leadership and wonders if there is any point to his revolution.
By the late ’70s, something in Sen had shifted. A melancholy mood, born out of the pyrrhic victories of radical politics, characterizes his films of this period. After the left government won the 1977 state elections in West Bengal, he turned his gaze inward to investigate the responsibility and complacency of the middle class, of which Sen had become a part. The Left ruled West Bengal for the next thirty-four years. During this time, Sen’s work became sparse and quiet, aesthetically stripped down but thematically intense.
Kharij (1982) involves a middle-class family reconsidering their values after their domestic help, a little boy, dies accidentally from carbon-monoxide poisoning. Sen’s 1991 film, Mahaprithibi, is his reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany: a family in Calcutta is broken when an elderly woman kills herself. Why? She wonders what was the purpose of her Naxalite son’s death. What did her other son achieve by escaping to Germany? What was the point of it all?
For almost a decade, Sen stayed away from cinema, emerging finally in 2002 to produce his final film, Aamar Bhuvan. Its mood, gentle and optimistic, breaks with that of many of his previous works. Had two decades of global neoliberalism, terrorism, the rise of the Hindu right-wing in India, and old age softened Sen? Aamar Bhuvan, which translates to “my world,” deals entirely with an all-Muslim community in a village. Despite the world burning and breaking, as on-screen text announces in the beginning, people continue to live with love, compassion, and empathy. The film is remarkably kind and full of good-natured people despite all darkness. Rather than a withdrawal from reality, the film is an attack on the prejudice meted out against India’s Muslim minority, made more radical by the Hindu nationalism of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party .
One hundred years on, Sen still stands as one of the most inventive filmmakers of his generation. His work provides a model of how politics and formal inventiveness can be fused in art without kowtowing to didactic simplifications.
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Student movement of Palestinian Authority’s ruling Fatah party lauds terrorist murderers in campaign video filmed at Birzeit University.
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Prime Minister Netanyahu excoriates IAEA decision to close probes of Iran’s nuclear program, calling move ‘surrender’ that leaves ‘black mark’ on the agency’s legacy.
By Pesach Benson, TPS
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s “surrender” to Iran is a “black mark” on the UN watchdog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the beginning of Sunday’s weekly Cabinet meeting.
He was referring to the IAEA’s decision to end its probe into a nuclear facility in Marivan, in western Iran, where traces of uranium were found in 2019. According to Iran, the IAEA also closed a separate investigation into uranium particles found in the underground Fordow facility.
“Regarding Iran – Iran continues to lie to the International Atomic Energy Agency – IAEA. The IAEA’s surrender to Iranian pressure is a black mark on its conduct,” said Netanyahu.
“We revealed information to the world that we brought Iran’s secret nuclear archive to Israel five years ago. Information that unequivocally proved that Iran violates the inspection agreements and that it operates in the nuclear field for military purposes and not for innocent civilian purposes,” the Prime Minister added, referring to the Mossad’s 2018 theft of an entire archive of Iranian nuclear documents.
“The excuses that Iran has provided in the years since then, for having nuclear material in prohibited places, these excuses are not only unreliable, they are not even technically possible. The lax conduct of the IAEA in the face of these failed excuses sends a message to the rulers of Iran that they are not required to pay any price for their violations and that they can continue to deceive the international community in their attempts to obtain nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu said.
“If the Atomic Energy Agency becomes a political organization, its monitoring activities in Iran will have no meaning, nor will the reports it produces on Iran’s nuclear activities have any meaning. In any case, Israel under our leadership does not stand by. We stand our ground firmly both in public and behind closed doors.”
Netanyahu also said that Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer and National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi returned from the US where they held high level discussions regarding Iran.
Netanyahu also expressed his condolences to three soldiers killed on the Egyptian border on Saturday, congratulated Israel’s under-20 soccer team for advancing to the World Cup semi-finals, and said that a committee being formed to lower the cost of living would begin meeting this week.
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