Good morning, readers, and welcome to June. It was a big week (for all things former-president-trial-related, see here). And these are the stories I couldn’t stop thinking about.
1. From Rafah
At least 45 people were killed on Sunday night by an Israeli airstrike on a camp for displaced people in Rafah. Malak A Tantesh and Emma Graham-Harrison have reported the descriptions of those on the ground. It’s a painful record of fear, grief and families and relationships being ripped apart.
One man interviewed, 36-year-old Zuhair, wants his “cheerful, ambitious” friend, Ahmed Zayed, remembered. “I love mentioning his name so we can assure the world that our dead were not just numbers,” he says. “They had lives and goals.”
How long will it take to read: Less than three minutes.
Who else is saying what?
Israel’s PM claimed Sunday’s strike was a “tragic mistake”. But Paul Rogers has suggested “these inhumane attacks on Rafah are no accident, they’re central to the IDF’s brutal, losing strategy”.
The call to prosecute Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes “exposes the west’s moral doublethink,” Simon Tisdall wrote earlier this week. “By attacking and undermining the ICC, Israel has proved again it is a state gone rogue,” he added days later.
Nesrine Malik built on this, pointing out that “in dismissing calls for Netanyahu’s arrest, the west is undermining its own world order”.
Further reading: A Guardian investigation with the Israeli-based magazines +972 and Local Call this week revealed Israel’s almost decade-long secret “war” against the international criminal court. Read that if you haven’t yet, and find our full coverage on the crisis here.
2. ‘Denying history is simply lying’
The University of Melbourne has published new research into the shocking corners of its own history: Dhoombak Goobgoowana (“truth-telling” in the Woi Wurrung language of the owners of the land on which the university was built). It reveals the influence of Nazi apologists, massacre perpetrators, grave robbers, racists and eugenicists throughout the institution. And as Lorena Allam reports, many of their words and deeds “have, until now, been absent from their official biographies”.
Repairing history, not rewriting it: “This is not revisionist history,” says co-editor and historian Ross Jones. “We are repairing revisionist histories of the past. I see this as a restoration job, to a degree. History has left stuff out. We’re putting it back in.”
His fellow co-editor Marcia Langton, the foundation chair of Australian Indigenous studies and associate provost at the university, sees the work grounding the university’s anti-racism work, and being taught in schools. “The lying in Australian history – the lying about Australian history – is one of the major contributors to racism.”
How long will it take to read: About six minutes.
3. The jaw-dropping fetish flamenco of Rocío Molina
About 18 months ago I started going to flamenco classes. Nothing on earth, I think, matches the fierce exultation of its shapes and rhythms. Rocío Molina, 39, is now one of the art form’s major international stars – and reshaping it through her own instincts. As Lindsey Winship writes, she has danced pregnant, in bondage gear and drenched in what looks like menstrual blood – “all to unleash the monsters lurking within her and all of us”.
But as Molina explains in this gorgeous interview, she never set out to shake things up.
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“Since I was little, I’ve always been told that I am the weird one, like an alien,” – Rocío Molina.
How long will it take to read: Three minutes.
4. Escape from the Nazis
Maxwell Smart is 93. When he was nine, his family were imprisoned by the Nazis and herded into trucks. His mother told him to run. His aunt and uncle paid a farmer to look after him, but then they were killed, and the farmer had to send him on his way. First, as Smart tells Chris Godfrey, he taught him the skills to survive.
A grim farewell: “He said: ‘I love you. But I can’t keep you. You have to go to hide in the woods.’”
For two years, Godfrey explains, Smart hid in the forest, evading hunters – detection meant likely death. It was 70 years before he told anyone his story (which has now, understandably, inspired a film).
How long will it take to read: About five minutes.
5. Lenny Kravitz at 60
Something lighter to end on? Simon Hattenstone has spoken to Lenny Kravitz about his shift to clean living: celibacy, discipline, his new music – and why he hasn’t been in a serious relationship for nine years. Also: the time he worked out in leather pants.
Has he ever been … a slob? “There are a couple of times I stayed in Paris for six months in between tours and I got a little poochy. I drank wine, I ate croissants. I just enjoyed myself and then I was like: oh shit! But that’s only happened once or twice.”
How long will it take to read: Five minutes.
Have a good weekend, write to me at australia.newsletters@theguardian.com – and never forget: “quitting is the devil’s fruit!”
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