Weekly Review
President Joe Biden gainsaid the view of Israel’s war on Gaza, with its death toll of some 36,000 Palestinians, as genocidal: “We reject that,” he said.1 2 His statement followed a request, from the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, for the issuance of an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his minister of defense, Yoav Gallant; the two men, along with three Hamas leaders, stand accused of having committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.3 The United Nations International Court of Justice ordered Israel to cease its military invasion of the Gazan city of Rafah, though the Israeli military ignored the court ruling, bombing Rafah in 60 aerial blitzes within the span of 48 hours.4 5 6 One air strike, which Israeli spokespersons have characterized as “precise,” killed 45 Palestinians sheltering in a tent camp for civilian refugees; the strike was intended to target two Hamas officials, and by that metric succeeded in its mission; Netanyahu described the ancillary loss of life, in which many refugees were burned alive, as a “mistake” and a consequence of “technical failure.”7 8 9 10 11 12 Representatives from Spain, Ireland, and Norway expressed their countries’ intent to recognize a Palestinian state, and the European Union considered whether to impose sanctions on Israel.13 14
Minnesotans gathered to mark the fourth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by a police officer.15 “You started college just as George Floyd was murdered,” said Biden in his commencement address to the graduating class of Morehouse College, one of the country’s historically black colleges and universities; “it’s natural to wonder if democracy you hear about actually works for you,” he continued.16 The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act was reintroduced to Congress after it had been ratified in the House of Representatives but was stymied in the Senate; the criminal-justice reform bill proposed to rein in police power nationwide.17 Michigan police swept the campus encampment for Palestine from the University of Michigan’s lawn, and the police crackdowns on pro-Palestine protests at campuses nationwide, which have involved firing tear gas and rubber bullets at students, were found to have flouted law enforcement protocol enacted in the wake of similarly violent repression of Black Lives Matter protests.18 19 “What do you think [Donald Trump] would have done on January 6 if black Americans had stormed the Capitol?” Biden asked 5,000 members of the NAACP’s Detroit chapter; in Detroit, the national People’s Conference for Palestine took place; for attempting “to prevent the genocidal maniac Netanyahu … from being held accountable for those crimes against humanity, you are an enabler, President Biden,” charged Representative Rashida Tlaib in an apostrophe to the commander in chief, who was not present for her remarks at the conference.20 21 22
Rudy Giuliani, the bankrupt onetime mayor of New York and erstwhile legal counsel to Trump, took to peddling coffee beans, at $29.99 for a two-pound bag, that he described as “chocolatey.”23 “I’ll explain it to you someday,” Trump said in response to the hypothetical question of how he puts his pants on; the comment came at an event in the Bronx, whose beaches join the rest of New York’s to make up what Mayor Eric Adams called “our French Riviera.”24 25 At a party for the 77th Cannes Film Festival, in France, the rapper Travis Scott engaged Cher’s boyfriend, a man four decades her junior, in a bout that was captured on film but that did not make the main slate of the festival’s offerings.26 In an interview, the actor Nathan Lane said that “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” the song Elton John wrote for the animated movie Lion King, was originally meant to be sung entirely by the characters Timon and Pumbaa, respectively a meerkat and a warthog, but that John had objected; “I didn’t want it to be sung by the rat and the pig,” he confessed.27 In Spencer, Massachusetts, three little piggies attended a yoga class.28 —Lake Micah
