Discovering the City of David—Proving Jewish Indigeneity | The American Spectator

When the Stones Speak: The Remarkable Discovery of the City of David and What Israel’s Enemies Don’t Want You To Know
By Doron Spielman
Center Street, 304 pages, $23

Has France’s president Emmanuel Macron, totally lost his mind? The Frenchman has just announced that he “would recognize Palestine as a state” to satisfy the French commitment to a “just and durable peace in the Middle East.”

Oddly enough, he announced his intentions on X — but not at the Elysee Palace, the European Parliament, or the United Nations.

The UK’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, has just joined him.

At the risk of shocking both leaders: There is no such country as Palestine. There never was. It has never existed. There is absolutely no archeological, historical, genealogical, or written evidence that a people known as “Palestinians” ever lived in the region; there are no ancient palaces, coins, scrolls, pots, seals, burial grounds, or evidence of any kind.

Even more shocking: The Jews are not the “settler occupiers” — they are the only indigenous people of the Holy Land, a fact that is important to both Christians and Jews and to all humanity. Denying that this is true constitutes a monstrous Blood Libel. The Jews are not the demon “colonialists”; they were the first-ever and long-time residents there. In addition, such archeological evidence documents that the Bible is not just a series of myths but is also, in part, historical.

“Palestine” is currently the most sacred of falsehoods, the largest and most lethal lie ever launched against the Jews in our entire history. It is shorthand for: “Exterminate the Jews.” “Replace the Jews.” In every language on earth, people have been infected with a pro-“Palestine” delusion, which amounts to a psychosis; they roar for “Palestine” on the internet, on the streets, on campuses, in restaurants, and in every international organization.

How can the European powers recognize a country with no government, no borders, no known history of self-rule? Why recognize a mere concept that means “Kill the Jews”? Why indeed.

With all due respect for genuinely peaceful and truth-loving Muslims and Arabs, who already command 49 countries on earth, including approximately twenty-two countries in the Middle East, “Palestine” is essentially a Jihadist war cry. Nothing else. It is the Mother of All Templates in terms of rewriting history.

I urge Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer to read Doron Spielman’s new book, When the Stones Speak: The Remarkable Discovery of the City of David & What Israel’s Enemies Don’t Want You to Know.

Spielman’s book is even more thrilling than an Indiana Jones movie. In fact, once I started reading his book, I did something that I rarely do — I took no notes, underlined nothing. It was like watching a fast-paced film. I did not want to stop for a moment. I literally could not put the book down.

Spielman’s book is a small masterpiece. He invites us to join his team of archeologists as they slowly and carefully discover the 3,000+ year-old Jewish City of King David in Jerusalem. Listen to Spielman’s language:

In Jerusalem, the stones have a story to tell, a story not only about Jerusalem. Rather it is a story of our people, both in the Land of Israel and in exile. It is as if the stones of Jerusalem gather these stories in our absence, catching them out of the air, storing them away safely, until a time we need to hear them, to remind us how we longed to come home.

On their bellies in mud and garbage, and in utter darkness (except for their torches or headlights), without knowing if they would ever find an exit or be able to crawl safely back the way they came, the archeologists not only find David’s City, but they also find the paved route which led from that city, and from King David’s palace, directly to the First and Second Temples, both of which once stood where the Al-Aqsa Mosque now stands.

The archaeological discoveries are astounding. Spielman’s team, led by Davidleh Beeri, is guided by the great Israeli archeologist Eilat Mazar, as well as by the initial findings of 19^th-century British archeological explorers Charles Warren and Corporal Henry Birtles, and early 20^th-century British archeologist Kathleen Kenyon. Beeri and Spielman were privileged to expand their predecessors’ work. (For your information, Kenyon discovered a “proto-aeolic capital,” which helped Mazar later identify the location of King David’s palace. Mazar found a 2,600-year-old clay seal with the name of Yehuchal ben Shelemiah–a name also found in the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah.)

Spielman’s team found the ancient steps of “the pool of Siloam,” from which Jewish pilgrims ascended to the Temple in Jerusalem–something they were obligated to do three times every year. They also found the purification baths they took in a very large communal bath (mikveh).

My God! Beeri and Spielman’s team discovered a little golden bell that once adorned the hem of the Jewish High Priest’s robes–and it still chimed or tinkled; seals with real Jewish names on them; coins in Hebrew from the Second Temple-era, when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. That is when the Emperor Hadrian spitefully renamed Jerusalem/Judea to “Syria Palestina” to erase all memory of the Jews. By then, the Philistines, the Plishtim (not the “Palestinians”), had been gone for more than seven hundred years. The Cannanites were long gone.

This archeological dig was not a political undertaking (although everything having to do with Jewish Israel swiftly becomes politicized). Thus, the theologically commanded Jew haters among the Arabs and in the Western media and governments, including various American administrations, tried in every way to sabotage and lie about what was being found. They claimed that the digging was a “colonial” overreach, a way of craftily “Judaizing” Jerusalem and the Holy Land. “Palestinian” leaders bought land illegally–and then accused the archeologists of doing so. Pro-“Palestine” Arabs removed tons of landfill under the Temple Mount in order to defeat any Jewish archeological discoveries. Israeli archeologists found where they had dumped some of it and sifted through it carefully over many years.

Spielman’s book is as enraging as it is enlightening. Even as–or precisely because–the digs led to amazing findings, a campaign of “coordinated deception” was immediately underway. For example, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish guidelines were prepared for the media and for diplomats, which were routinely followed.

“The area would be referred to as either ‘Silwan’ or ‘Wadi Hilweh’ and almost never as the ‘City of David.’”

“In the rare event that the phrase ‘City of David’ was mentioned, it would be only to refer to it as an archeological ploy used to justify expropriating land from Palestinians in an attempt to ‘Judaize’ the areas with government assistance.”

The Obama administration and UNESCO condemned the various archeological digs, even that under the Givati Parking Lot in Jerusalem, where eight to eleven civilizations had been found, including a Roman-Byzantine palace; an earlier Second Temple palace, which belonged to a Jewish queen named Helena of Adiabene; coins; a royal seal, dating back to the First Temple, which had a woman’s name on it: Ileana the daughter of Gael; and a series of homes dating back to “the time of the Bible.”

The 2016 UNESCO resolution demanded that Israel, “the Occupying Power, cease the persistent excavations in and around the Old City.” This denied Jewish history and privileged a “Palestinian” history, which has never existed. After all, as Spielman points out, “the Dome of the Rock sat over the site of the Jewish Temple built by King Solomon sixteen hundred years before Islam came to the world.”

The Obama White House was easily convinced that the Israelis were throwing Palestinians out of their homes. That was never the case, but it was the story with which the media ran.

Let me be clear: The significance of this excavation far exceeds archeology. It exposes the lie that the Jews are “settlers” and “occupiers” in the Holy Land. This is the primary reason that Iran, Qatar, the Arab League, the Palestinian Authority, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, etc., as well as left-wing billionaires, have supported as well as funded the American Ivy Leagues and the entire world media in an effort to deny and disappear the fact that the Jews are indigenous to Israel, especially to Jerusalem.

I was especially haunted by Spielman’s account of his college-year friendship with an Arab-Christian woman in the United States — and by his most unexpected meeting with her in 2002, in Bethlehem, in Manger Square, when terrorists Yasser Arafat, Hamas, and Fatah Tanzim had stormed the Church of the Nativity, took two hundred people hostage, and began desecrating the Church. American media (Ted Koppel) insisted on presenting Arafat and Hamas in a very good light, and the IDF very negatively.

Suddenly, a group rushed towards the Church with food. Their leader was Spielman’s old friend, Huwaida (Arraf), a woman with whom he had shared many peaceful Shabbat dinners when he still lived in Michigan. She insisted that she “will never stop fighting until the genocide against the Palestinians ends.” She remained intransigent. Spielman responded:

“‘Genocide? What genocide?’ I asked her. ‘The Palestinian population has grown to be at least five times larger since 1948.’” Spielman offered her water and an apple and she refused it, saying: “I won’t eat the food of the occupation.”

Huwaida had changed since she married Adam Shapiro, an anti-Zionist Jewish-American man, an organizer and activist with the International Solidarity Movement.

I used to have such conversations with people who sound like Huwaida. I no longer believe that reason, logic, truth, facts, or words will change their minds. We must find out what will.

However, I do hope and pray that Spielman’s book will get into the hands of every open-minded person alive.

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