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In the early days of the Israel-Gaza war, American artist Massoud Hayoun began painting an imagined audience of moviegoers at an Arab cinema.
In An Arab Movie House, a young man in a cinema front row wears a keffiyeh. At the back, Hayoun has painted himself sitting beside the late Egyptian author Nawal El Saadawi and close to his grandmother, Daida, who is wearing a Tunisian chechia.
Many in this fictional audience are moved to tears as they watch a film depicting a different struggle, The Battle of Algiers, about the Algerian War that culminated in the country’s independence from France.
“I wanted people [to feel that in this] perilous, hopeless situation, justice will prevail,” said Hayoun.
As the war in Gaza nears its ninth month, Hayoun is now leaning towards despair.
The work is part of the journalist-turned-painter’s exploration of his family’s North African Jewish heritage. In his writings and art, Hayoun often questions his family’s exile.
“I'm not trying to reclaim Jewish Arabness. I'm trying to say that people who are of Jewish faith can be an active part of this cultural production, even if we no longer live in our home countries,” he said.
Hayoun, 37, was born in Los Angeles and was raised by his maternal grandparents, Dadia and Oscar – Jewish exiles from Tunisia and Egypt. They had settled in the US after not making a home in Israel or France.
Arabs in America
Oscar, a disillusioned Zionist from Alexandria, actively sought out Arab communities in Los Angeles, shopping in Arab-owned stores, making sure there were always Arabic pastries available in the house for his grandson.
“My grandfather died when I was 16, and I spent and continue to spend my whole life looking for him by going back to Arab countries. That’s why these paintings exist,” said Hayoun.
“He was from an old-fashioned generation that doesn’t exist any more. He was that Abdel Halim generation,” he said, referring to 1960s Egyptian musician and performer Abdel Halim Hafez, whose patriotic songs were frequently sung during the 2011 Arab Spring in Egypt.
Dadia appears in many of Hayoun’s works in her chechia, smoking a cigarette or coring chillis to make Tunisian harissa paste. She often appears twice in the paintings: as the more traditional mother who is cooking for her family, and as a more radical women’s rights advocate.
Hayoun says “everything” is about Dadia. “About how cool and revolutionary she was.”
His exhibition at Larkin Durey gallery in London comes as US and UK campus protests against the war in Gaza are in the spotlight. Jewish students have played a role in encampments, sparking debate about generational shifts in the community’s relationship with Israel.
The show is not explicitly about the war in Gaza, some paintings produced at the time of the war make reference to it. By showing his work in London, Hayoun hopes to reach an audience that may be more open to his work than in the US.
“It has become more and more difficult to show art that sympathises with the Palestinian liberation cause for various reasons in the US,” he said.
“I would definitely be called anti-Jewish for having these conversations, even as a person who does believe in God and whose parents were of Jewish faith,” he said.
In another painting, Dadia appears next to a bridge overlooking the Parisian Seine, as Il Kahina, a Berber queen who led the indigenous resistance to Muslim conquests of North Africa. The Islamic traveller Ibn Khaldun believed she came from a Berber Jewish tribe.
“She has been used by Jewish North African people to talk about the indigeneity of Jewish people to North Africa,” said Hayoun, adding that French colonials also drew on her story to diminish growing Arab nationalist fervour of the time.
Written along the walls of the river bank in the painting are slogans from France’s race protests, including “Justice pour Nahel” – justice for Nahel – after the police killing of teenager Nahel Merzouk in a Paris suburb last June.
Another piece of graffiti “Ici on noie les” – here we drown the – is a reference to Algerian liberation protesters who were shot at and thrown into the Seine by police in Paris in 1961.
At least 40 demonstrators, and as many as 300 by some estimates, were killed. Afterwards, graffiti appeared on Pont Saint-Michel across the Seine stating, “Ici on noie les Algeriens” – here we drown the Algerians.
Hayoun’s grandparents, who lived in Paris at the time, often told this story to Hayoun, who refused to believe it for many years.
Obscured identities
How Jews lived in and why they left the Middle East is a hotly contested issue, and one which Hayoun has sought to tackle in his book When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History which tells his grandparents' story.
Like other minorities, Jews were second class citizens in the Ottoman Empire – known as dhimmis – who were subject to pay a jizya tax until this was abolished in 1856. Elite families from these minority communities served as intermediaries with European powers.
Jews and Christians participated in Arab nationalist movements and were prominent figures of the Arab renaissance, or Nahda.
“Jewish Arab people started to stand together with Christian and Muslim Arab people to advocate for a progressive, free and federal Arab world,” said Hayoun.
At the centre of our identity is this Arabness above any religious identity, above any other identity
Artist Massoud Hayoun
But Jews were expelled from Egypt and Iraq in the 1950s, and hostility in other countries towards the community after the creation of Israel caused many to flee the region.
Many other communities, including Egyptian Greeks and Armenians, were also targeted.
Hayoun says he does not shy away from this fraught history, but that an Arab Jewish identity has been wrongly obscured.
“At the centre of our identity is this Arabness above any religious identity, above any other identity. We stand with the political and cultural and socio and social movements of the Arab peoples that our families have belonged to since time immemorial,” he said, citing the works of Moroccan Jewish writer and human rights activist Sion Assidon, who he interviewed for his book.
“Colonial-era documents from the French and British spoke of how each generation of Jewish Arabs would be progressively de-Arabised in a politic of a divide and conquer.”
Oscar grew up in a city remembered nostalgically for its Levantine cosmopolitanism.
In letters which Hayoun discovered and had translated in LA, his grandfather wrote: “Only Egyptians speak so many languages and are so sophisticated.”
So much so, that his wife regularly accused him of an “arrogance mal placee” – a misplaced conceit.
This may be why Oscar struggled to fit in to Israeli culture driven by Eastern European socialism, or as a North African immigrant in France, a country still reeling from the traumas of the Algerian war, in which the story of displaced Algerian Jews vanished from collective memory for decades.
Yet Oscar’s worldly spirit appears to live on in Hayoun, who converses in French, Arabic and the Spanish he picked up in LA. He also learnt Mandarin as a foreign correspondent in China, and references to all of these cultures appear in his work.
Reflecting on his time as a correspondent in Beijing, Hayoun paints Dadia in her two iterations alongside an American and a Chinese woman, who sit at opposite sides of a table coring chillies to make harissa.
The American woman, Hayoun explains, knows she will continue to work until she is old owing to the absence of social services, whereas the Chinese woman is based on a waitress he had met in Beijing, whose wages had been stolen by her employer.
“Coming from the United States, I thought that capitalism was a freer, more human rights-orientated system, even though I was from a leftist family,” said Hayoun. “I came to find that both in the United States and in China, you are what you do for labour there, you have no other identity.”
In this sense, his work is as much about America's place in the world, as it is an exploration of his family's lost heritage.
In another work, Hayoun places his grandmother in Buenos Aires alongside the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who gathered weekly at the square seeking answers about their children who had disappeared during Argentina’s military dictatorship.
Hayoun first shared this work on social media, where he was contacted by Argentinians of Middle Eastern descent, a historic community there from present day Lebanon, Syria and Palestine.
It was a community in which Hayoun perhaps saw a lot of himself. Though many no longer speak Arabic, he noticed how they shared a “deep, spiritual, ethnic collective connection with their homelands”.
“They experience great solidarity with the Palestinian people in this time, with anybody who identifies with an Arab cultural legacy,” he said.
It is a lasting connection which also gives him hope.
“The fact that Arabs are such a diverse thing, with so many different kinds of skin colours, lived experiences, political ideas, ways of being, that it's still deeply felt by people who are three or four generations removed from their Arab citizen ancestors, is a beautiful thing,” he said.
Between Broken Promises, Harissa, an exhibition of work by Massoud Hayoun, runs at Larkin Durey gallery, in St James’s, central London, until May 24.
Global Fungi Facts
• Scientists estimate there could be as many as 3 million fungal species globally
• Only about 160,000 have been officially described leaving around 90% undiscovered
• Fungi account for roughly 90% of Earth's unknown biodiversity
• Forest fungi help tackle climate change, absorbing up to 36% of global fossil fuel emissions annually and storing around 5 billion tonnes of carbon in the planet's topsoil
Infiniti QX80 specs
Engine: twin-turbocharged 3.5-liter V6
Power: 450hp
Torque: 700Nm
Price: From Dh450,000, Autograph model from Dh510,000
Available: Now
Profile box
Company name: baraka
Started: July 2020
Founders: Feras Jalbout and Kunal Taneja
Based: Dubai and Bahrain
Sector: FinTech
Initial investment: $150,000
Current staff: 12
Stage: Pre-seed capital raising of $1 million
Investors: Class 5 Global, FJ Labs, IMO Ventures, The Community Fund, VentureSouq, Fox Ventures, Dr Abdulla Elyas (private investment)
The schedule
December 5 - 23: Shooting competition, Al Dhafra Shooting Club
December 9 - 24: Handicrafts competition, from 4pm until 10pm, Heritage Souq
December 11 - 20: Dates competition, from 4pm
December 12 - 20: Sour milk competition
December 13: Falcon beauty competition
December 14 and 20: Saluki races
December 15: Arabian horse races, from 4pm
December 16 - 19: Falconry competition
December 18: Camel milk competition, from 7.30 - 9.30 am
December 20 and 21: Sheep beauty competition, from 10am
December 22: The best herd of 30 camels
What sanctions would be reimposed?
Under ‘snapback’, measures imposed on Iran by the UN Security Council in six resolutions would be restored, including:
- An arms embargo
- A ban on uranium enrichment and reprocessing
- A ban on launches and other activities with ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, as well as ballistic missile technology transfer and technical assistance
- A targeted global asset freeze and travel ban on Iranian individuals and entities
- Authorisation for countries to inspect Iran Air Cargo and Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines cargoes for banned goods
Specs
Price, base: Dhs850,000
Engine: 3.9-litre twin-turbo V8
Transmission: Seven-speed automatic
Power: 591bhp @ 7,500rpm
Torque: 760Nm @ 3,000rpm
Fuel economy, combined: 11.3L / 100km
Profile of RentSher
Started: October 2015 in India, November 2016 in UAE
Founders: Harsh Dhand; Vaibhav and Purvashi Doshi
Based: Bangalore, India and Dubai, UAE
Sector: Online rental marketplace
Size: 40 employees
Investment: $2 million
TV: World Cup Qualifier 2018 matches will be aired on on OSN Sports HD Cricket channel
Earth under attack: Cosmic impacts throughout history
- 4.5 billion years ago: Mars-sized object smashes into the newly-formed Earth, creating debris that coalesces to form the Moon
- 66 million years ago: 10km-wide asteroid crashes into the Gulf of Mexico, wiping out over 70 per cent of living species – including the dinosaurs.
- 50,000 years ago: 50m-wide iron meteor crashes in Arizona with the violence of 10 megatonne hydrogen bomb, creating the famous 1.2km-wide Barringer Crater
- 1490: Meteor storm over Shansi Province, north-east China when large stones “fell like rain”, reportedly leading to thousands of deaths.
- 1908: 100-metre meteor from the Taurid Complex explodes near the Tunguska river in Siberia with the force of 1,000 Hiroshima-type bombs, devastating 2,000 square kilometres of forest.
- 1998: Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 breaks apart and crashes into Jupiter in series of impacts that would have annihilated life on Earth.
-2013: 10,000-tonne meteor burns up over the southern Urals region of Russia, releasing a pressure blast and flash that left over 1600 people injured.
Volvo ES90 Specs
Engine: Electric single motor (96kW), twin motor (106kW) and twin motor performance (106kW)
Power: 333hp, 449hp, 680hp
Torque: 480Nm, 670Nm, 870Nm
On sale: Later in 2025 or early 2026, depending on region
Price: Exact regional pricing TBA
GAC GS8 Specs
Engine: 2.0-litre 4cyl turbo
Power: 248hp at 5,200rpm
Torque: 400Nm at 1,750-4,000rpm
Transmission: 8-speed auto
Fuel consumption: 9.1L/100km
On sale: Now
Price: From Dh149,900
Ferrari
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
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How to protect yourself when air quality drops
Install an air filter in your home.
Close your windows and turn on the AC.
Shower or bath after being outside.
Wear a face mask.
Stay indoors when conditions are particularly poor.
If driving, turn your engine off when stationary.
FFP EXPLAINED
What is Financial Fair Play?
Introduced in 2011 by Uefa, European football’s governing body, it demands that clubs live within their means. Chiefly, spend within their income and not make substantial losses.
What the rules dictate?
The second phase of its implementation limits losses to €30 million (Dh136m) over three seasons. Extra expenditure is permitted for investment in sustainable areas (youth academies, stadium development, etc). Money provided by owners is not viewed as income. Revenue from “related parties” to those owners is assessed by Uefa's “financial control body” to be sure it is a fair value, or in line with market prices.
What are the penalties?
There are a number of punishments, including fines, a loss of prize money or having to reduce squad size for European competition – as happened to PSG in 2014. There is even the threat of a competition ban, which could in theory lead to PSG’s suspension from the Uefa Champions League.
COMPANY%20PROFILE
%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3ECompany%20name%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Switch%20Foods%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EStarted%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%202022%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EFounder%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Edward%20Hamod%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EBased%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Abu%20Dhabi%2C%20UAE%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EIndustry%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Plant-based%20meat%20production%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3ENumber%20of%20employees%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%2034%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EFunding%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20%246.5%20million%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EFunding%20round%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Seed%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EInvestors%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Based%20in%20US%20and%20across%20Middle%20East%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
Dhadak 2
Director: Shazia Iqbal
Starring: Siddhant Chaturvedi, Triptii Dimri
Rating: 1/5
What the law says
Micro-retirement is not a recognised concept or employment status under Federal Decree Law No. 33 of 2021 on the Regulation of Labour Relations (as amended) (UAE Labour Law). As such, it reflects a voluntary work-life balance practice, rather than a recognised legal employment category, according to Dilini Loku, senior associate for law firm Gateley Middle East.
“Some companies may offer formal sabbatical policies or career break programmes; however, beyond such arrangements, there is no automatic right or statutory entitlement to extended breaks,” she explains.
“Any leave taken beyond statutory entitlements, such as annual leave, is typically regarded as unpaid leave in accordance with Article 33 of the UAE Labour Law. While employees may legally take unpaid leave, such requests are subject to the employer’s discretion and require approval.”
If an employee resigns to pursue micro-retirement, the employment contract is terminated, and the employer is under no legal obligation to rehire the employee in the future unless specific contractual agreements are in place (such as return-to-work arrangements), which are generally uncommon, Ms Loku adds.
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
MOUNTAINHEAD REVIEW
Starring: Ramy Youssef, Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman
Director: Jesse Armstrong
Rating: 3.5/5
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OTHER IPL BOWLING RECORDS
Best bowling figures: 6-14 – Sohail Tanvir (for Rajasthan Royals against Chennai Super Kings in 2008)
Best average: 16.36 – Andrew Tye
Best economy rate: 6.53 – Sunil Narine
Best strike-rate: 12.83 – Andrew Tye
Best strike-rate in an innings: 1.50 – Suresh Raina (for Chennai Super Kings against Rajasthan Royals in 2011)
Most runs conceded in an innings: 70 – Basil Thampi (for Sunrisers Hyderabad against Royal Challengers Bangalore in 2018)
Most hat-tricks: 3 – Amit Mishra
Most dot-balls: 1,128 – Harbhajan Singh
Most maiden overs bowled: 14 – Praveen Kumar
Most four-wicket hauls: 6 – Sunil Narine
THE SPECS
Engine: 1.5-litre turbocharged four-cylinder
Transmission: Constant Variable (CVT)
Power: 141bhp
Torque: 250Nm
Price: Dh64,500
On sale: Now
The Bio
Ram Buxani earned a salary of 125 rupees per month in 1959
Indian currency was then legal tender in the Trucial States.
He received the wages plus food, accommodation, a haircut and cinema ticket twice a month and actuals for shaving and laundry expenses
Buxani followed in his father’s footsteps when he applied for a job overseas
His father Jivat Ram worked in general merchandize store in Gibraltar and the Canary Islands in the early 1930s
Buxani grew the UAE business over several sectors from retail to financial services but is attached to the original textile business
He talks in detail about natural fibres, the texture of cloth, mirrorwork and embroidery
Buxani lives by a simple philosophy – do good to all
From Zero
Artist: Linkin Park
Label: Warner Records
Number of tracks: 11
Rating: 4/5
Defence review at a glance
• Increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027 but given “turbulent times it may be necessary to go faster”
• Prioritise a shift towards working with AI and autonomous systems
• Invest in the resilience of military space systems.
• Number of active reserves should be increased by 20%
• More F-35 fighter jets required in the next decade
• New “hybrid Navy” with AUKUS submarines and autonomous vessels
COMPANY%20PROFILE
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Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
Specs
Engine: Dual-motor all-wheel-drive electric
Range: Up to 610km
Power: 905hp
Torque: 985Nm
Price: From Dh439,000
Available: Now
The biog
Name: Gul Raziq
From: Charsadda, Pakistan
Family: Wife and six children
Favourite holes at Al Ghazal: 15 and 8
Golf Handicap: 6
Childhood sport: cricket
