Amman: The President of the Arab Thought Forum, Prince Hassan bin Talal Sunday opened the Twelfth International Conference on the History of the Levant entitled “Historical Writing in the Levant in the First Five Centuries of the Hijri.”
Prince Hassan stressed that the purpose of the dialogue about the Levant is to sound the alarm, especially since the issue is related to identity, and building independence and integrated and equal relations between the countries of the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula.
He noted the “need” to direct spending towards real security, which is human security, especially in countries suffering from wars, crises, famine and poverty.
His Highness described what is happening in the Gaza Strip as a “third Nakba” that would leave victims, leading to a human tragedy that exceeds any material compensation.
He added, “What is happening has destroyed all the slogans of sustainable development, most notably ‘leaving no one behind.'”
He noted that talking about the Levant requires takin
g into account the overlapping elements, namely space, identity, immigration and multiple identities, especially with the policies of lethalities used by the Israeli war on Gaza.
He discussed the need to talk about the “cultural genocide” in Gaza.
He added, “Cultural genocide is the absence of spatial memory in the absence of the people who carry it. This is what we are witnessing with the systematic destruction of neighbourhoods and residential blocks with their entire population, to kill spatial memory by killing all its owners.”
In turn, the Chair of the Council of the Centre for Documents, Manuscripts and Levant Studies, Muhammad Bakhit, said that the previous ten conferences over 52 years included scientific symposia that were published and revised in 35 volumes, and the conference then became a research school with several senior historians taking its podium.
The Centre for Documents, Manuscripts and Levant Studies organised the event with the Yarmouk University, the University of Jordan and Damascu
s University.
Source: Jordan News Agency