For more than 3,000 years, Jerusalem has been the beating heart of the Jewish people. The connection between Jews and Jerusalem stretches back to the Hebrew Bible—to the reign of King David, to the many kings and prophets who succeeded him, and into the Second Temple period.

With history this ancient, archaeology plays a crucial role in confirming what tradition has long held. Today, that evidence is finally being unearthed—but also contested. Palestinian and Islamic extremists continue to deny the Jewish history of Jerusalem and actively seek to erase the proof of it.

In a powerful essay for Mosaic, Doron Spielman—who helped lead the excavation and development of the City of David archaeological park—tells the story of how the most significant modern discovery in Jerusalem’s archaeology came to light. He reveals the remarkable findings that connect the Jewish people to their ancient capital—and the sinister effort to suppress them.

To explore this history and its explosive implications, Spielman joined Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver on Tuesday, April 29 for a live discussion about the City of David, the archaeology of Jerusalem, and his forthcoming book, When the Stones Speak: The Remarkable Discovery of the City of David and What Israel’s Enemies Don’t Want You to Know.

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Jonathan Silver: 

I’d like to begin by offering a couple of thoughts about why it’s important for us at Mosaic to invest in this subject and why it’s so important, I think, for the Jewish reading public. We are of course convening on the week of Yom HaZikaron and Yom ha-Atsma’ut, the days in which we remember the fallen heroes of Israel and celebrate Israel’s independence. Zionism has always been considerably more than just a political movement, it is also a movement about the Jewish return into history, in which the Jewish people could assume for itself responsibility for every element of its national life.

Now that phrase, the return to history, has embedded in it a presumption about Jerusalem’s past and the Jewish people’s past. And I think that one of the things that the science of archaeology allows us to do is substantiate that past in a more visceral way than perhaps is possible in any other science. Of course, we have our textual tradition and our unbroken chain of learning and transmission, passed on from parents to children, but this is something altogether different. If you’re like me, you have been excited by watching House of David on Amazon over the course of the past weeks, and then seeing the very buildings that are depicted in that show come to life, not in the Hollywood’s recreation, but in situ, such that the earth itself is uncovering the truth of Israel’s ancient past. That is at the core of what we’re celebrating at Yom ha-Atsma’ut. And that’s why we’re so excited to welcome everyone to this conversation with Doron Spielman, the author of this month’s essay at Mosaic, “The Parking Lot that Determines the Future of Jerusalem’s Past,” which is drawn from Doron’s forthcoming book that he’s going to tell us about in a few minutes.

Doron, I want to ask a little bit about your background, how you got into this question, and about your involvement with City of David.

Doron Spielman:

I was born in Farmington Hills, Michigan, and that’s where I was brought up and raised. Then, I went to the University of Michigan where I graduated with a degree in international relations. Somewhere along the way a friend of mine took me to Israel. And it was really when I saw the soldiers of Israel, who were the same age as me, that I began to feel that there was an essay that I hadn’t read, it was the essay of the Jewish people returning home, the subject you just spoke about so beautifully.

So, I joined the Israeli army where I’m an IDF spokesman to the foreign press and have now spent well over a hundred days in this current war, Swords of Iron, representing Israel to the foreign media. And 23 years ago, as hard as it is to believe, I was given an opportunity to join an archaeological project that was very much connected to what I was doing in the army, which was defending Israel against misinformation, disinformation, and lies. At the time it was just a hole in the ground, but today it’s the magnificent City of David archaeological site.

Jonathan Silver: 

The essay begins by explaining not the contemporary excavation, but a 19th-century excavation that considerably predates the efforts at City of David archaeological site. Tell us the story of how we began to see that there are elements of Jerusalem’s past that are important to the biblical narrative and which are found outside of the current bounds of the Old City of Jerusalem.

Doron Spielman:

Well, that’s actually where the City of David gets its adventure. You may have seen the Indiana Jones movies, but here is a real-life series of events that took place in 1867 in Jerusalem. At the time, Queen Victoria—a vivacious, brilliant woman—ruled England. At some point she decides, “You know what? I want the Ark of the Covenant in England.” You have to understand first that archaeology, back in 1867, wasn’t a formal discipline. It wasn’t a science. You didn’t go to university to learn it. At this point, archaeologists were essentially treasure hunters. And so Queen Victoria goes to a decorated naval captain, Charles Warren, and she said, “Listen, Charles, I’ll give you the money. Go to the Holy Land, bring me back the treasures of Solomon and the Ark of the Covenant.”

And this is how the story begins. Charles Warren comes to the Holy Land, and from there he goes to the Old City, because if you want to uncover the Ark of the Covenant, that’s where you begin. And he goes into the Old City and he negotiates with the Ottoman Turks, the Muslims, and they’re not sure about letting him dig on the Temple Mount, but they take his money, anyways. At some point he realizes he’s been had, and they come to an agreement that he can’t dig on the Temple Mount, but they tell him to dig next to it, near the Western Wall where the Jews are praying. They tell him, basically, to go bother the Jews. We know from his diary that he moves the Jews out of the way, and he begins digging shafts which can be seen today at the Western Wall. Those were made by Charles Warren. He digs straight down at the Western Wall and then off to the side underneath the Temple Mount. He’s pulling out pottery and still the Muslims are uneasy, so he’s working quickly and he’s putting stuff on ships that are bringing everything back to England, to get as much done as he can before somebody shuts it down.

After some time, people in England are sifting through the items he’s sent, and realize they aren’t finding anything significant. He has people sifting locally, too, and he can see there’s nothing major coming out of the shafts, but he doesn’t understand why. He’s finding things that are old, 2,000 years old, but nothing from the biblical period, so he’s not sure where the excavation is heading at that point. Then, one day, he leaves the Old City and goes for a walk through the countryside, and there he sees two villages, a Yemenite Jewish village and an Arab village next to a valley called the Kidron Valley. And he walks through the valley and at the foot of the valley there’s a freshwater spring, and Charles Warren stops to taste the water. He’s drinking when he realizes that the stream is flowing, not into the valley like he would expect, but into the mountain. And he takes a torch, and he walks further down the stream and he finds himself walking through knee-high water into a mountain.

Charles grabs his crew, and they’re trudging through this water and after about 50 feet, they look over their heads and they see a shaft, and they climb up the shaft and they uncover an underground city, which is amazing. It’s like the story of Atlantis, but it happens to be real. Beneath the mountain they find an entire city. And now the stuff that they’re pulling out, that they’re sending back to England, is 2,000 years older than the stuff that they had found in the Old City. He doesn’t understand what’s happening. Why would there be an older city outside the Old City?

Charles Warren was a devout Christian. He knew his Bible. He would read a chapter of the Bible every night and he knew it by verse by verse. And he says, “There’s a line in the Bible that we don’t understand. When King David comes to capture Jerusalem, it says, ‘King David said on that day, he who captured Jerusalem from the Jebusites captured the gutter, the water source of the city.’” And it’s odd because in the Old City of Jerusalem, there’s no water source. The water has to be brought from other areas. Even today, there is no water source. But here there is a water source.

So he says, “Wait a second, there’s an underground city here; there’s a water source. Maybe this is the actual city of Jerusalem from the time of the Bible.” And that is how the City of David becomes known. Captain Charles Warren makes the case that there’s an underground city that is the Jerusalem of the Bible. And you can imagine how shocking this was for the Jews, Muslims, and Christians who already had an Old City. By the way, at this time, in 1867–80 years before the founding of the state of Israel—it’s important to note that Jews made up the majority of the population in the Old City of Jerusalem.

As I was saying, the Jews and the other inhabitants of the Old City were not thrilled about this, asking “What do you mean that this place where we’re living is not the Old City?” It is an old city, but it’s just not the oldest city. And from the moment of Charles Warren’s discovery, many, many excavation crews around the world begin coming to the site and begin pulling out the evidence—the actual physical evidence of the Bible. And that is how the Palestine Exploration Fund, which funded Charles Warren, gets started. It still exists, though, ironically, today it’s iffy about its relationship to Israel. That is the story of the rediscovery of the City of David.

Jonathan Silver: 

Our story starts with Charles Warren at the end of the 19th century, but archaeological excavations and discoveries have been going on ever since. And the City of David, the national park that you’ve been associated with in your time, and whose story you tell in your forthcoming book, seems like it’s something new.

Doron Spielman:

That’s right, and there’s a reason for that. Now that we’ve given the backstory, the modern state of Israel is really where the book comes in. This book was written because, at the end of the day, we’re all aware of a seven-front war against Israel. But there’s actually an eighth front, and this eighth front has been going on for a much longer time than the war that started on October 7th. The eighth front is the battle underneath the ground, not in the tunnels of Gaza, but underneath the ground in Jerusalem. It’s the battle over the archaeological evidence of Jewish history in the Land of Israel and the concentrated effort that has been made to try to rewrite the history of the area to erase that Jewish connection.

One of the moves in this war happens in 1948 ,after Jordan conquers and occupies Jerusalem and the City of David. One of the first things the Jordanians do is they blow up the synagogues in the Old City and they cover the City of David. Not only do they cover any excavations that have been made, but they also cover the area with homes. Now Israel comes back in 1967 and it’s busy in the Old City walls inside the Jewish Quarter. Israelis know there’s this older excavation outside, on land that was privately owned by Baron Edmond Rothschild, and they decide that they can get to that project another day.

Meanwhile, they’re clearing out the Old City of Jerusalem and the City of David lies in waste. And in fact, archaeologists do try to excavate there, but there was no protection: there were no Jews around and the area started fulfilling up with Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) members who were operating near the Western Wall to scare Jews, and who were committing terror attacks. So, the archaeological work has come to a stop at this point.

And so, Israel sends in an undercover unit called Duvdevan, which is the unit that the TV show Fauda is based on. Duvdevan was led by a commander named Davidleh, which means Little David. And Little David is leading an undercover unit in what is now the City of David, but at the time, it had been merged into the Silwan neighborhood, and all of the excavations had been completely covered. One day, one of his informants, an Arab, tells him, “You know that Jews used to live here and that there’s Jewish land here and that there are old excavations here.” Davidleh was completely surprised, so he begins researching and realizes that not only had Baron Rothschild bought the land, but that there were excavations that took place and to which it was no longer possible to reach.

As Davidleh continues to research the site, and comes to the realization that Silwan is on top of the actual biblical Jerusalem, he comes to the conclusion, which might seem obvious now, but at the time people thought was crazy, that the Jewish state had to have access to this Jewish equivalent of the Acropolis. He, he decides to do something about it, and it takes years. He only really begins in the 90s, and I joined him in the early 2000s. At that time, when we began, we were really alone. There was a small group of people in the government, and there was a small group of donors, and a few other people who realized that this is the proof of why we are here and that we were going to need this proof. This was before people understood the full meaning of the work we were doing, and before they realized the battle that would be waged in the world, that we are facing today.

And so, therefore, you’re correct, Jonathan. There was a wave of excavations that lasted up until the 1920s when the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, began inciting riots that targeted Jerusalem and Hebron, and really did not pick up again, with a few exceptions, until around the year 2000.

And so that’s why we don’t know, even though we’re educated Jews, about the City of David. It’s perhaps ironic or providential that, only now, at the moment when on college campuses and everywhere else our existence is being challenged, that the archaeology in the City of David is coming alive again. That is why I wrote the book. I’d written it before October 7th, but, after that, I had come face to face with the real nature of the challenge. I had written and had my copy in my hands, and I was supposed to meet with an editor on October 9, 2023. But on October 9th, I was already on the border with Gaza.

And when I came back home after a break, I looked at my manuscript and I said, “God, I should have known.” Because if you read the book, it shows very, very clearly the early attempts to erase our history. And I said to myself, I said to Sarah, my wife, “Look, we should have known. If someone’s going to erase your history, we know where that leads. We know what happens next: they’re going to try to erase you.” And so I sat back down to writing when I first got out of the army in January, before I went back in again. It took me a while to be able to concentrate after seeing what I saw, but with that conversation in the background, I rewrote the book again, and I added the chapters about the war.

Jonathan Silver: 

Many of the things that Doron describes in the book best come to life visually, and he’s actually prepared to show them to us. Doron, I’d like to ask you show us some of the discoveries that you’ve made along the way, those things that you’ve discovered for yourself and that have been the fuel to help you tell this story. And we’re having this conversation of course, on the eve of Yom HaZikaron. It will be Yom HaZikaron in Israel soon and so I’d like for us to conclude before the commemorative siren sounds there. Doron, why don’t you show us some of the visual evidence that you’ve uncovered along the way in the City of David.

Doron Spielman:

We are going to do a few thousand years in a few minutes, so fasten your seatbelts. First of all, a very, very brief background. You can see this in this aerial picture, looking north towards the Old City. There is the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock near the top, and the City of David, actual ancient Jerusalem, is just to the south of that. You can see the modern road leading from the Old City down to the City of David. Underneath that modern road is an ancient road, which is perhaps the most outstanding discovery we’ve made. The spring that Charles Warren found in the 19th century is just to the right, east of the City of David, over in the valley. In Warren’s time, of course, all of those homes were not there, as you can see in the next picture. This was the City of David, at the bottom of the hill, down from the Old City walls. This is actually taken fairly late in 1920, but you can see how empty it was.

The event that brought me to the City of David actually happened on the Temple Mount. Here is a picture of the Temple Mount that was taken in 1999. Now what you can see there is the result of someone having dug out the Temple Mount.  Everything here was underground, and people have uncovered, below the ground, pillars, walls, and arches. And this was, in fact, an attempt by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to excavate a new mosque on the Temple Mount. Originally, permission had been given by the Israeli government under the condition that an archaeologist had to be there, but when the Palestinians threatened Ehud Barak that they would riot, he gave up on the demand for archaeological supervision. And this is what they began to do.

The next, blurry picture tells us exactly what was happening. This was taken by an undercover camera in the hands of an undercover team that infiltrated the work being done on the Temple Mount. You see a heap of old stones right there in the foreground. You see, in the back, a saw against the far wall. And then the stones are carved up and they end up there, on the left, in a stack of neatly carved, white stones. Well, these are 2,000- and 3,000-year-old stones that are being carved on the Temple Mount and then made into regular stones.

In the next image, you can see those stones are being used on the Temple Mount to refloor the Temple Mount. They are taking ancient antiquities, and they are reusing them, to dig the largest mosque in the state of Israel, large enough for 10,000 people.

The discovery of this archaeological destruction is one of the things that brought me to the City of David. It was the systematic destruction of the archaeological treasures on the Temple Mount that woke me up to some degree, along with another harrowing incident I had in the city of Bethlehem, which I described in the book, that led me to change my life and dedicate it to the archaeology of Jerusalem and to fighting so that the City of David would really be in Israeli and Jewish hands.

Now that leads us to a photo from the Israeli excavation. What you see above is a metal grate. Above that metal grating is where my office used to stand. In 2004, an archaeologist came into my office and she said, “You know what? There was a pillar head found in the City of David many, many years ago that is Phoenician in design.” And if you look in the Bible, after King David captures Jerusalem via this water source, he wants to build a palace, but he doesn’t have anyone who knows how to build it. There had only been one Jewish king before him, Saul, so palace builders weren’t very well established.

And so he goes to the Phoenicians, because they were the most skilled builders. And the king of Phoenicia, Hiram, builds King David a palace. And she said, “We found right next to your office a Phoenician pillar head.” As you can see, we dug down, and we found all of these archaeological rooms that you can see. And she said, “You know what? I found an olive pit in one of these rooms. And I sent it off to Oxford for carbon dating.” She carbon dated that olive pit to 1000 BCE, the time of King David.

Now, there was an enormous archaeological storm around this, because 1000 BCE, the time of King David, is very controversial. This archaeologist intuits then that this must be King David’s palace. And this has massive ramifications. Whenever you uncover anything that shows anything Jewish about [ancient Israel], there is always pushback. And, of course, there was pushback in the news and there were Palestinian archaeologists that were saying things against this and against Israeli archaeologists. But Eilat Mazar, the archaeologist at the site, who is very tenacious, had one answer for them. She said to them, “Look, we can argue, but let’s see what these stones have to say. Let the stones speak.” That answer gave me the name for my book, When the Stones Speak.

And this is what they said. In the biblical period, important documents would be wrapped in twine with a little clay seal over the twine, effectively sealing the scroll. That is how they used to sign ancient documents to ensure that nobody who wasn’t supposed to be reading them would read them. This is a 3,000-year-old form of encryption. Dr. Mazar finds one of these clay seals and she calls me and says that she found a seal, which is pictured here. I said, “Dr. Mazar, it’s incredible. Is there a name on it?” So she’s trying to work out these letters and, if you’ve seen ancient Hebrew letters, they kind of resemble modern Hebrew script, but they also look a little bit almost like Chinese symbols. And the reason for that is because this is the early Hebrew of the Bible.

Dr. Mazar calls me the next day and says, “Look, if you open up the Bible, there’s a story that the prophet Jeremiah is saying to the last king in the line of David, ‘You’re corrupt. And if you don’t take care of the orphans and the widows, this city will be destroyed.’ And there are four ministers of the king who try to get a blessing from Jeremiah. Why a blessing? Because Jeremiah was right, the city would be destroyed, and Babylon had surrounded Jerusalem, and they wanted the prophet to encourage the soldiers to fight. But the prophet Jeremiah says, ‘Listen, God is going to destroy the city because you’ve sinned. If you allow the Babylonians to take over, you’ll come back in 70 years.’

“So, the ministers come back to the king and they say, ‘Look, not only is he not blessing us, but he’s cursing us. Let’s kill the prophet.’ These four men try to kill the prophet Jeremiah, but eventually he gets away.” I go into this story in more detail in the book. The chief minister who tried to kill the prophet Jeremiah is named is Jucal, the son of Shelemiah. That is his seal. So, we have now a home in the City of David and at its foundations there’s an olive seed dated to the time of King David. Since then, there have been many more carbon-dated elements going back to the time of King David. And then we have identified a minister of one of the descendants of King David 400 years after his reign.

By the way, the person who originally funded this excavation is none other than Roger Hertog, whom I hope our audience has at least heard of. Roger is a founder of Tikvah and played a crucial role in founding Mosaic. And Roger was the person who originally had that vision.

And after we uncovered this, every Friday, Ekrima Sabri, who was then the mufti of the Temple Mount, would give a speech and he would say the following words, and I quote, “Every stone that has ever been turned over in Jerusalem, not a single one of them has ever shown a Jewish marking. This was a mosque, it is a mosque, and it will be a mosque.”

The head of education for the Palestinian Authority said, “It is the art of the Jews to deceive the world. There is nothing in the Bible that has been found in Jerusalem.” And Yasir Arafat said to Bill Clinton, as recorded by Dennis Ross, “If there ever was a Temple, it is not here. It was a thousand miles away.” Where? In Yemen. So, the Houthis have our Temple. By the way, lest we think that they have stopped saying these things, it was earlier this week that Mahmoud Abbas, was recorded saying once again, “If there was a Temple, it is in Yemen.” The same type of inculcation and the erasing of Jewish history, which by extension erases Christian history, which by extension erases the history of the West, is still going on. And so, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas began to take note of the site.

After that, there was an incredible excavation. There was a sewage main that broke here, and it led to the discovery of a pool. Now finding a pool in Jerusalem is incredible. We don’t find many. And, in the picture, you can see stairs going down to the pool. Many of them are broken because no one knew that they were there, and a tractor from the city damaged some of the stairs. This pool is magnificent. The archaeologists said that this was an ancient ritual bath, which meant if you wanted to go into the Temple, you had to go into this ritual bath. And from here you walked all the way up to the Old City walls about half a mile. And an archaeologist said, “You know what? If I’m correct, there’s going to be a road leading from this pool to the Temple itself.” Because the [Jewish] laws of purity require you to be pure in order to enter the Temple. And once you’ve been purified, you have to be on a ritually pure pathway from the bath to the Temple [in order to avoid becoming contaminated again].

And what we did was follow this underground tunnel, and I write about this in the book, and in Mosaic. I was one of six people who crawled from the pool, through this tunnel, on our stomachs. As you can see in the picture, this is original, we didn’t make this. This tunnel has walls. It has a ceiling. We’re crawling through this tunnel from this pool and it’s heading north in the direction of the Temple Mount. And at some point, the most magnificent thing happens. Over our heads, we start to see instead of this flat ceiling, the bottom of a staircase over our heads, going up. We realized that we were in a sewer or a water main, and above our heads was the road that the archaeologists were talking about.

In this illustration, you can see a pilgrimage road where all the people are walking, and underneath it was the water tunnel. We were right there, inside that water tunnel. Now, both the actual pilgrimage road and the tunnel through which we were crawling are exposed, and you can walk through them.

In the interest of time, since this is the evening of the Israeli Memorial Day, I’ll just add one note. The pilgrimage road is a beautiful road made of thick stones, but it’s broken in a few places. Inside these holes we found completely intact pots, which when you examine them on the inside, contain the remains of food. And we know from Josephus Flavius, the historian, that after everyone else died in the siege of Jerusalem, there were 2,000 Jews left. And he writes that they hid inside this tunnel, the Siloam Tunnel. When the Romans heard them, Josephus writes, they ripped open the ground, they caught them, and they killed some of them, and they sold some into slavery in Egypt. This is what those Roman soldiers ripped open.

We found the actual road under which those people were killed. And I wanted to add this because I think it’s so just momentous to say this on a year when, unfortunately, many of us know people who have died fighting in the war. When these people died, they had coins with them. And those coins, we found thousands of them, have a marking, that says, “The fourth year of the fight against the Romans.” On the opposite side, it says, “For the freedom of Zion.” The Jewish people in Jerusalem didn’t give up. They fought. And here we are about to hear a siren, 2,000 years later, and we’re fighting the same fight.

And back then, and I go into this in the book, after we lost this war, we tried throwing off the Romans unsuccessfully one more time. It was the Roman emperor Hadrian who realized that the Jews will never stop coming back to Israel because it has their name nor to Judea because they’re called Jews. That’s why Hadrian changes the name of Judea to the name of a people who had been extinct for 700 years, called the Philistines, which in Latin is Palestine. He changes the name of Israel to Syria Palaestina in order to try to sever any connection between the Jews and the land. And it is very powerful to see these Jewish coins that predate Islam by 650 years. And it shows that, just like today, they knew they were Jewish, but their enemies were trying to erase their connection to the land. It’s incredible how little has changed.

I’m going to move us forward now. Once we began uncovering the road, Israel’s enemies tried to stop us. This ranged from the Muslim Brotherhood to the extreme left that took us to court, to even Hamas who throughout the years tried carrying out three assassinations against the head of the City of David project. Thank God, they didn’t succeed. And at some point, it even involved the State Department and a White House administration. Now, you’ll have to go into the pages of the book to see how even the United States government intervened at one point to try and stop this.

Now, Jonathan, before we end, I’ll just go through a few things. Lesley Stahl did a piece, for 60 Minutes, on the City of David. It was what we call a hatchet job. Lesley Stahl came to the site of the City of David, and she interviewed me and, before the interview began, she asked for a quick tour. She said, “This is the first time I’ve ever brought my husband on a film shoot.” He wanted to come to the City of David. So, I took them on a tour, and he was crying when I showed him those seals that I just showed you, and she was deeply moved. And this entire piece that she did basically was to undermine the City of David. There is not one mention of those clay seals that brought her husband to tears. It was only about what wasn’t there. As a matter of fact, the executive producer of 60 Minutes is finally retiring after all this anti-Israel claptrap.

Following this on October 1, 2014, the Obama administration made an official White House declaration against us, which read that “The United States condemns occupation of residential buildings in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in East Jerusalem—this is near the Old City— by individuals associated with an organization whose agenda, by definition, stokes tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. These provocative acts, these acts by this organization, only serve to escalate tensions at a moment when those tensions have already been high.” This was an attempt by the White House under President Obama to stop the excavations in the City of David because they realized what they meant.

There’s one last thing I want to share with you. At corner of the Temple Mount, where the southern wall meets the Western Wall where men and women pray, at the very heart of the cornerstone of the Temple Mount, deep underneath the ground, we made one of the most remarkable discoveries. I have a chapter in the book explaining what we found, but I want to give you one little inkling. This is a golden bell made of 24-karat gold. The bell is still inside. It was found right underneath that cornerstone. This is one of the most remarkable discoveries, it was found directly next to that cornerstone. This bell was in my hand on the day it was found.

It is the only time a golden bell has ever been found in Israel, pure gold with a bell. And if anyone’s nodding right now, it is because, in the book of Exodus, it says that the kohen gadol, the high priest of Jerusalem, wore golden bells along the hem of his garment. And this was found directly next to the cornerstone of the Temple Mount. This bell shouts not only indigeneity, but it brings together something else. It brings together Judaism, which is the foundation of Christianity, and the foundation of the West because this is in the book of Exodus. And I will conclude here. I will just say that the City of David is now a national heritage site, the only one in Israel that is a joint U.S. and Israeli heritage site because of what the site means. This was done by Ambassador David Friedman for the Israeli people. Jonathan, back to you.

Jonathan Silver: 

So Doron’s book, When the Stones Speak, is going to be published [on May 13]. You can take an early foray into the text in Mosaic. That’s the basis of our conversation. And that piece in Mosaic is built around another one of these case studies, not only Charles Warren in the end of the 19th century, but also contemporary times. A lot of the essay focuses on a particular case study of Palestinian obstructionism in the form of the Givati Parking Lot. And before we wrap and invite a couple of questions, Doron, I want to just ask you to tell us that story. What happened there?

Doron Spielman:

Well, it’s actually incredible. Of all places, in between the City of David and the Old City lies a parking lot, or, rather, used to lie a parking lot where people would park. This goes back a number of years, but the parking lot was owned by two Jewish developers who thought about creating a shopping mall, which is not a bad idea near the Western Wall. They fell on hard times, and they were offered an incredible sum of money to sell their parking lot, and they agreed to do it. The extent to which they knew, we’ll never know for sure, but the people offering them that money were part of the Palestinian Authority, which at the time was essentially like Hamas. This happens during the second intifada, so truly an enemy of Israel.

And the Palestinian Authority’s vision was to build a building, the Palestine Center for Peace, with a bridge to al-Aqsa. And we realized that any place in which there is archaeological value, as we’ve seen from the Temple Mount itself, would be destroyed. One side wants to dig, is curious, and wants the truth, like Eilat Mazar, who said “When the stones speak, they’ll tell you.” And the other side absolutely does not want you to dig. And it was really due to Ariel Sharon’s intervention that this deal was called off. It was a national issue. In the end, the parking lot was purchased for a lot of money by a group of Jewish philanthropists who did not want it to fall in the hands of the Palestinian Authority.

And when we dug down into that parking lot, it was really incredible. We uncovered eleven different civilizations going from the modern Muslim era all the way to the early Muslim era, the Byzantine period, the Second Temple period of Herod, down to the First Temple period where recently we uncovered another clay seal, this one even older than the previous one, that bears the name of Nathan-Melech, the servant of King Josiah. All of that would have been destroyed had the Palestinian Authority been allowed to take over this parking lot.

Jonathan Silver: 

Before we end, I’d like to look at some of the strategies that officials at the City of David use to try to acquire land surrounding the archaeological sites, and some of the difficulties you’ve run into. As you say, the modern Arab village, the mixed village of Silwan, includes any number of Palestinians families. Just as normal homeowners are willing to sell, they’re never going to get more money than what the City of David is willing to pay them to sell their apartment. Nevertheless, Palestinian law makes that very hard for them to do.

Doron Spielman:

You hit the nail on the head, Jonathan. It’s true. It’s basic economics. Once the area is so important— imagine a home that’s lying next to the White House, that’s still around—they know you’d pay almost anything for the house. And so, these families do want to sell. It’s a major cashflow for them and they’re trying to sell. But as you mentioned, the Palestinian Authority—and this is the moderate Palestinian Authority, so-called, that some people, who are meshuga want to put in charge of the Gaza Strip—has an official fatwa on any Arab that sells land to any Jew in Jerusalem. [So Palestinians who own homes in the area want to sell them, and have every incentive to do so—but are afraid of reprisals, and won’t.]

You know, it’s interesting, I was interviewed by the U.S. consulate a number of years ago during the Obama administration, which they came to protest the City of David as we discussed before. And I said to them, “You say you care about the Palestinians.” “Yeah, we care. We care. We care.” And I said, “Okay, well why are they not people?” They said, “Of course they’re people.” I said, “Well, they’re being terrorized, and their rights are being challenged, and they’re threatened with death for buying or selling a home. If you really care about them, why aren’t you defending them? Why aren’t you defending them against the Palestinian Authority and Hamas?” Well, they didn’t really have much to say about that, but that is the reality.

So, what do we do? It was very difficult. It’s easier today than it used to be, but you would have to go through all these shenanigans just so that they could sell a home and that they could move on and find a better life. And it’s so ironic that it is their rights that are being challenged by their own leadership and no one’s standing up for them. As a matter of fact, the only people that are standing up for them is the state of Israel.

And that’s actually when Obama came out against [the City of David Foundation] with that statement. Prime Minister Netanyahu and Ron Dermer both appeared on Face the Nation, and they actually answered that claim. And they said, “Any Arab who wants to buy land in Jerusalem has the right to do so, and any Jew who wants to buy land in Jerusalem has the right to do so.” And when they made that statement, it was helpful for us. And once again, right now since this war began, they feel more secure knowing that Israel’s strong. When they feel Israel’s strong and Israel’s willing to enforce their rights, they’ll sell, and they’ll be more loyal to the state of Israel. When they sense Israel is weak, and I go into this in the book in great detail, then they’re afraid. They’re afraid Israel won’t defend them. And you know what? They’re right. That’s the sad thing. They’re right.

Jonathan Silver: 

But it also teaches us as consumers of media reporting on the subject that, to the extent that one comes across news items which relay Palestinians having a temper tantrum about having been tricked or that they didn’t know that they were actually selling to Jews, one can recognize that actually those might have been willing sellers who need to have a temper tantrum in public in order to try to minimize the political and religious and cultural forces arrayed against them.

Doron Spielman:

There is no question. I have personally witnessed dozens and dozens of such cases. It always bothered me because we paid a great price for the land. You have these willing sellers who would do this, and of course we understand that they would do it and we were friends with them. I mean, when you conclude the agreement, you have a haflah, which is a festive meal where you bring sweets and sweet tea and sweet coffee, and we do this with the Arabs. So, you have a haflah and then two days later, you know what’s going to happen, you see them on the news saying that they’ve been tricked, and this is because they’re scared for their lives.

And this is a problem that I think Israel has to take responsibility for. I don’t mean to be critical of Israel. We have our hands full in so many things, but this is an issue we haven’t addressed for so long. And now that there are so many Jews living in the City of David and so many positive relations with the Arabs, that it has actually created a very different environment because as they start to know each other, they feel much more secure. And that’s only possible with a strong Israel.

Jonathan Silver:

We have more questions than we can get to, but I’ll get into some of them now.

Number one is not about the archaeological dimension, but the legal and political situation: can you speak to the possibility of changing the status quo in the Temple Mount so that it’s no longer controlled by the Waqf, [the religious trust administered by Jordan].

Doron Spielman:

No question. There have been attempts to do this before. And Israel has to have a backbone when it takes place. The Waqf’s control has been reduced in recent years. It is no longer able to operate freely. There were years under weak prime ministers, especially Ehud Barak, where if Palestinians threatened to riot, the Shin Bet was ordered to leave the Temple Mount. And that’s how they carried out that archaeological destruction. I mean, where was the Shin Bet when people were digging up the Temple Mount?

Today, the Shin Bet is on the Temple Mount, permanently. However, it is absurd that the Waqf should have any sense of control. There are movements in Israel, within the political sphere, to make the Waqf into a trust that holds the Temple Mount, but in which every element of every operation in the Temple Mount is Israeli. And I will just say that the last time this was put forward, the Israeli police installed metal detectors at one of the gates of the Temple Mount and as a result, the Muslims rioted and Israel capitulated. And the moment Israel capitulated from doing that, the situation in the Temple Mount was worse for about two years because they sensed the weakness coming from Israel. Today things are much firmer. But yes, there is an opportunity to do it. The state of Israel could do it. And I believe that, yes, there will be the same headlines against us for about three weeks and then it will go away, and it will be safer than ever been before. So yes, there’s an attempt and you can see online who’s trying to move it forward in the Knesset.

Jonathan Silver: 

You can’t know for sure, of course, but what further excavations expanding David’s palace in the City of David do you expect? What other discoveries do you think we might anticipate in the coming weeks and months?

Doron Spielman:

It’s a fantastic question. I don’t know for sure, but I have some suspicions. First of all, the area of King David’s palace that we’ve uncovered up until now is only 16 percent of that entire structure, so imagine another 84 percent. The palace of King David extends underneath our road, and it goes into that same parking lot we just spoke about. In fact, in that area we just talked about where we found that seal, there is now a thought that maybe that is a distant room of King David’s palace. It may be part of the exact same structure.

So now we’re excavating the parking lot, and Yuval Gadot, the archaeologist who was there recently, told me that he thinks that there may be a real connection between these two areas.

And I’ll tell you what we’re hoping to find in King David’s palace. The irony of King David’s palace is that King David was a very successful king and therefore, for 400 years, additional kings lived in his palace. And it’s not by chance that we find the things belonging to the most recent king. If you take the White House and you close it up right now, kick everyone out, and you come back in a thousand years, you’re not going to find George Washington’s underwear. You’d find President Trump’s underwear, I would assume. And so that’s exactly what happened when we came back to the palace. What we are looking for is a room, if we get lucky, that went out of use during the time of King David or just after and that’s where you will find the objects that relate to that period. And the more we dig, the more we’ll get there.

Jonathan Silver: 

Doron, you have consciously decided to put this unbelievable effort at summoning the truth out of the ground and putting it into a political context, because Israel’s adversaries have forced our hand and politicized the work you are doing. We’ve spoken about the struggles over history, and of course these extend not only into media but also into the realm of academic scholarship. And we do have a couple of questions naming some prominent archaeologists, some who are a little more friendly to the work of the City of David. For instance, one person is asking about Jodi Magness. And then some who are a little more critical and deny altogether the connection between the Jewish presence and the City of David. For instance, one person is mentioning a professor named Nadia Abu El-Haj at Columbia. But I would just broaden the question to ask how you counter the academic pseudo-scholarship that denies these findings, given that the academy is as lively a field in the battle of ideas as any other.

Doron Spielman:

So, there are two ways of doing it. One is direct and the other one is around the side. Directly, Eilat Mazar had the correct idea, which is why I took the title of the book, When the Stones Speak, from her words. You let the stones speak, you allow any archaeologist to come to the City of David and do an examination. And as a case in point right now, and I think it’s one of the most important things, is that Tel Aviv University was the bastion of what’s called biblical minimalism. That’s very different from what people like Abu El-Haj do, which is on the scholarly level of Holocaust denial. I’m speaking of the legitimate academics at Tel Aviv University who are skeptical about some of the conclusions drawn from the City of David excavations.

We said to them, “Come and dig.” And in fact, the name I mentioned, Yuval Gadot was the head of the department at Tel Aviv University and he’s a good friend and he’s digging there. Yuval Gadot is the one that dug down to that palace and found the seal of Nathan-Melech, the servant to the king. And in my recent conversation with him, about a study that was published in 2024, in which through new technology they have now carbon dated a massive number of items that could not have been dated previously. And those items pointed to the City of David darting back to the time period between the 9th and 11th century BCE. I joked, with him saying, “What’s between nine and eleven? Yuval? The number ten.” He just doesn’t want to say the 10th century because it’s so associated with King David, but that’s where they are. And he wrote an article in Haaretz saying, “The pendulum has swung back in the direction of the larger City of David, a monumental city from that time period with discoveries going back to the time of King David.” So, the best thing you can do is allow an actual academic to come and see what the stones have to say.

Now, the anti-academics who do not want to come to Israel, just like they don’t want to stand at a checkpoint, and they don’t want to see what’s happening in Gaza, they don’t want to come to the City of David and dig. And when you show them the evidence, the answer I’ve gotten numerous times is that, “This is simply a Zionist plot.” And the way to approach this, and this is what I believe, and we can see it happening, is that you really try to speak to the masses as opposed to only focusing on the academics. You have to address the academics, and God bless our archaeologists who go to these conferences overseas. But as to the idea of the City of David today—I’ll give an example, just yesterday I was with the new [American] ambassador, Ambassador Mike Huckabee.

And if you watch the interview, it’s very clear to him that his job is taking the information and the truth of Israel and bringing it to the world. I mean, he’s an unbelievable ambassador. And the more people that are willing to do this, the more people will understand what’s going on. This goes along with what you said about the House of David TV series and all of these things that bring information directly to people who are interested, and that’s what I’m hoping my book will ultimately do. It’s a miracle that Hachette Book Group is publishing this book because they’re the fourth-largest publisher in the world. Not everyone’s going to love that they’re publishing this book, but the idea is to get the information into the hands of college kids and adults who are still looking to learn. And if we can do that, we can overwhelm our enemies with volume.

Jonathan Silver: 

The essay is called “The Parking Lot that Determined the Future of Jerusalem’s Past.” And the book from which it is drawn is called When the Stones Speak: The Remarkable Discovery of the City of David and What Israel’s Enemies Don’t Want you to Know. Doron, thank you so much for being with us.