What Israel’s Enemies Don’t Want You to Know

Some 20 years ago I was walking from my home in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City to pray at the Kotel (the Western Wall), Judaism’s second holiest site, second only to the Temple Mount itself that towers above it. On the steps to the Kotel Plaza, I passed an Arab tour guide speaking in English to a large group of European tourists. Pointing toward the Golden Dome and the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, he said, “The Jews claim that their two temples stood on this spot, but there is no proof whatsoever to that claim.”

I was stunned. No proof? The gigantic, distinctive “Herodian stones” of the Western Wall itself, the remnant of the retaining wall King Herod built around the mountain when he enlarged the Second Temple, starting in 20 BCE, were incontrovertible proof. And what about the numerous contemporary historical descriptions of the Temple, including historian Josephus Flavius’s eye-witness account of the Temple, written in the first century CE?

Although an inveterate debater, I stood there unable to utter a word of rebuttal because I was shocked speechless by the boldfaced lie. It was as if an acknowledged scientist was telling his students that the world is flat.

Only recently, when reading Doron Spielman’s new book, When the Stones Speak, did I become aware that that Arab tour guide was just a small part of a widespread, carefully calculated campaign to deny the Jewish People’s historical claim to Jerusalem and the land of Israel.

The invective, “Colonialists!” being shouted against the Jewish State on university campuses and in European capitals is based on the allegation that European Jews came to Palestine in the late 19^th and early 20^th century as foreign occupiers. In the wake of the Holocaust, according to this view, the United Nations voted for a Jewish state, alongside an Arab state, in the small piece of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, in order to assuage their guilt. The implication of “colonialists” is that Jews have no more rights to that patch of land than the British had to India.

Herodian Drainage Channel Beneath the Pilgrimage Road, City of David Archives

An inconvenient contradiction of that narrative is the Bible, which chronicles over a thousand years of Jews (then called “Israelites”) living in that patch of land. “The Bible should be put aside,” claimed Palestinian archaeologist, Hani Nur el-Din, professor of archaeology at Al-Quds University. “It’s not a history book.”

This statement, writes Doron Spielman, “was part of the broader, long-standing trend of denying Jewish history in Jerusalem that had persisted for decades.” In When the Stones Speak, he provides hair-raising evidence of this campaign.

(Even the name “Palestine” was an effort by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, after the Jewish revolt of 132-135 CE, to sever the historical identification between the Jews and their land, which had been called “Judea” for centuries. The term “Palestina” derives from the Philistines, one of the ancient Sea Peoples who had lived along the coast of Judea and disappeared from history with the Babylonian conquest seven centuries before the Romans exiled the Jews.)

If you can’t trust the Bible to legitimate the Jewish people’s historical claim to the land, then perhaps archeological discoveries in the City of David, the original Jerusalem which lies to the south of the walled Old City, can provide proof that Jews lived there in antiquity. When the Stones Speak is the riveting story of those archeological digs and what they revealed, as well as the opposition that tried to stop them.

The Crusade to Deny History

Excavating the City of David faced massive pushback from the Palestinian leadership and the European NGOs that support them. Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, the Mufti of the Temple Mount and one of the founders of Al Quds University, told a reporter for the German Die Welt in 2001, “There is not the smallest indication of the existence of a Jewish temple on this place in the past. In the whole city, there is not even a single stone indicating Jewish history…. It is the art of the Jews to deceive the world.”

The Drainage Channel and the Excavator going down the ladder, City of David Archives

Walid Awad, a Palestinian scholar in charge of publications for the Palestinian Ministry of Information, asserted in 1996: “The fact of the matter is that almost thirty years of excavations did not reveal anything Jewish…. Jerusalem is not a Jewish city, despite the biblical myth implanted in some minds.”

Even as recently as May, 2023, Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, addressing the United Nations, claimed that there was no proof whatsoever of Jewish ties to the al-Aqsa compound [the Temple Mount]. He stated that Israel “dug under al-Aqsa. They dug everywhere and they could not find anything.”

Doron Spielman, author of When the Stones Speak

When the Stones Speak tells of astonishing finds in the City of David that disprove the Palestinian lies. Dr. Eilat Mazar, a courageous and independent archeologist, using the Bible as her guide, discovered a monumental building, with walls 20 feet thick, which she maintained was the palace of King David and subsequent kings of Judea. She dated pottery she found within the ruins to the tenth century BCE, the time of King David.

Archeologists from Tel Aviv University, who had made a career of denying the Bible, jumped on Dr. Mazar and questioned the dating of her pottery shards. They argued that the massive building, clearly belonging to a ruler, was from two centuries before King David or three centuries after. In those years, only organic matter could be conclusively dated. An olive pit found deep in the structure was sent to the laboratories of Oxford University for Carbon-14 dating. After weeks of tumulteous debate in the media about Dr. Mazar’s discovery, the results came back: the olive pit was from 1000 BCE, the period of King David.

The clay seal of Yehuchal ben Shelemia, The Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University, courtesy of Dr. Eilat Mazar.

Even more electrifying was her discovery of a clay seal that bore the name, written in paleo-Hebrew, of “Yehuchal the son of Shelemiah.” The Bible relates that the prophet Jeremiah, who lived in the 6th century BCE, prophesized that the mistreatment of orphans and widows would bring Divine judgment against the kingdom. Four of King Zedekiah’s officers told the king that Jeremiah was fomenting panic in Jerusalem. The Bible records the name of one of those officers: Yehuchal the son of Shelemiah.

The Pilgrimage Road

The Pilgrimage Road, City of David Archives, photo: Koby Herati

Even more gripping is the story of discovering and excavating “the Pilgrimage Road,” a 700-meter series of expertly chiselled limestone steps that led from the Siloam Pool, a giant ritual bath discovered at the southern tip of the City of David, directly to the Temple Mount. As Doron Spielman writes:

The road we had discovered wasn’t just a Pilgrimage Road; it was the Hag Pilgrimage Road used by the ancient Israelites who came to Jerusalem more than sixteen hundred years before Islam was founded.

This historical fact should have posed no challenge to Islam were it not for the Palestinian leadership. But they had been teaching an entire generation of their people the falsehood that there never was a Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, and that the site was first sanctified by Muhammed…

With the discovery of King David’s Palace and the Pilgrimage Road, the City of David was transformed from a small backwater excavation into a leading archaeological site.

And with that transfomation came threats of violence against Israelis in general and against our workers, and even an attempted assassination.

The Siloam Pool, City of David Archives: Dudi Vakhnin

I never expected a book on archeology to be a page-turner, but Doron Spielman is a master story-teller. As vice-president of the City of David for 20 years, he provides an eye-witness account of the drama and suspense of using archeology to prove that the Jews are the indigenous people of the tract of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. With a cast of colorful characters from Elie Weisel to Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, this is a must-read story.

As the author writes: “Grab almost any Israeli off the streets in Israel today and they will likely tell you: ‘We are here. We have always been here. And we’re not going anywhere else.’”

With the revelations narrated in this book, every Jew in the world should be able to vouch: The Jews have always been in the land of Israel. We are the indigenous people between the river and the sea.

Click here to buy When the Stones Speak

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