HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal, accompanied by Her Highness Princess Sarvath El Hassan, attended the opening of a photography exhibition and the launch of the book “Gaza, the Arabs’ Gateway to the Mediterranean: Memory and Art” on Tuesday.
The exhibition showcases rare photographs and archaeological findings from French-Palestinian missions carried out in Gaza between 1995 and 2019. These expeditions were initiated and overseen by Father Jean-Baptiste Humbert, an archaeologist with 53 years of experience working in the Middle East. The event was organized by the Friends of Jordan Festivals Association in partnership with the Royal Institute for interfaith Studies, and was attended by ambassadors accredited to the Kingdom along with a range of cultural and diplomatic representatives.
In his address, HRH El Hassan reflected on his visit last year to the exhibition “Gaza’s Rescued Treasures: 5,000 Years of History” at the Arab World Institute in Paris. He observed that many of the artefacts on display would likely have been lost had they not been removed from Gaza around two decades ago and safeguarded at the Geneva Museum of History and Art. He stressed that these cultural works, much like their Palestinian owners, remain displaced. He noted that for much of the modern period, Palestinians have been deprived of the chance to establish a national archaeological excavation program through which they could narrate their own history, turning archaeology into not only a record of the past but also a form of resistance against erasure and forgetting.
His Highness cited the observations of Scottish historian William Dalrymple regarding the widespread view of Gaza as little more than a vast refugee camp. He underscored that Gaza is, in reality, among the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities and has never existed on the fringes of history. Instead, it has long served as a vital crossroads between Africa and Asia, linking the Arab world to the Mediterranean and, beyond that, to Europe. He also reflected on the successive layers of Gaza’s urban history built up over centuries, stretching from the Bronze and Iron Ages through the Assyrian, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine eras, and continuing into the Islamic, Crusader, Mamluk, and Ottoman periods. He described this long continuity as a dialogue unfolding across time.
His Highness pointed to the port of Balakhiya in Beit Lahia, where earlier excavations had revealed Roman-era features that testified to Gaza’s character as an open and interconnected Mediterranean city prior to its destruction in 2023. He stressed that the exhibition and the accompanying book urge Gaza to be remembered for its collective memory, identity, and human history, rather than being portrayed solely through the lens of conflict, and called for the safeguarding of this heritage as an integral part of our shared humanity.