Those who control the past, George Orwell famously warned, control the future. In his new book, When the Stones Speak: The Remarkable Discovery of the City of David and What Israel’s Enemies Don’t Want You to Know, author Doron Spielman brilliantly connects battles over the Jewish people’s past to present efforts to deny the Jewish state’s legitimacy. As he makes clear: The past matters more than ever.

On its surface, When the Stones Speak is about the discovery of the ancient City of David, which sits just south of the Old City of Jerusalem. But thanks to Spielman’s gift for storytelling and his welcome penchant for using history to explain current events, the book is about far more than an archaeological dig.

The City of David was established more than 3,000 years ago by a king named David of the tribe of Judah. Young, willful, and impulsive, David is one of the Hebrew Bible’s most unforgettable figures. He sinned, slew a giant, united the tribes of Israel, and ruled for four decades. One of history’s first warrior-poets, David’s life inspired plays, books, and song and verse for centuries. Some have long dismissed his existence as a mere fable. But the discovery of the city that he established so long ago is evidence otherwise.

David’s descendants ruled for a thousand years, until they were defeated and dispersed by Rome in 70 A.D. First the Romans, and later the Persians, Muslims, Crusaders, and Ottomans would rule over a neighboring hill, which became known as the Old City of Jerusalem. The walls of the Old City excluded David’s original site. "The City of David," Spielman observes, "eventually fell into disrepair and was abandoned and covered by the sands of time until it was forgotten." But this proved to be a blessing.

"Being forgotten was perhaps what saved the City of David," Spielman points out, "for over the next two thousand years while the Old City of Jerusalem was frequently the site of war and was ransacked countless times by marauders searching for treasures from the Bible, the City of David and its biblical treasures lay buried, protected and largely undisturbed."

The dust began to be removed in the 1860s, when explorer Charles Warren was hired to conduct Britain’s first archaeological expedition in the Holy Land. Warren’s work focused mostly on the Old City, but he and his team stumbled upon what would later be identified as the City of David. It would be up to other explorers to fully unearth the city and bring it back to life. And Spielman would not only have a front row seat—he would also be a driving force in the process.

Born in Michigan, Spielman moved to Israel in his late 20s. Soon he found himself pulled into the orbit of David Be’eri, the charismatic and indefatigable founder of the Ir David Foundation. Be’eri spent years—decades, in fact—working to fulfill his vision of bringing the City of David to life. As Spielman makes clear, the discovery of the city wouldn’t have happened absent committed figures like Be’eri who ignored the naysayers and held firm to their conviction that the ancient city was not only there, beneath the dirt and dust, but worth protecting and sharing.

Spielman’s personal story, and the intriguing cast of characters he meets on his journey, are interwoven throughout When the Stones Speak. It took a village to unearth a site that is key not only to Jewish history, but to Western civilization as well: brave members of Congress, donors willing to take a risk, and archaeologists willing to dig against the grain.

The effort to explore and save the City of David faced innumerable challenges. The reason is simple: The City of David upends a carefully crafted, and well-protected, narrative—a narrative that portrays Israel as colonialist and which erases the Jewish people’s connection to their ancestral homeland. Its first proponents were arguably the Romans who, after expelling many (but, as Spielman highlights, not all) Jews, renamed Judea "Syria Palaestina" in the 2nd century A.D. The Romans, however, would not be the last to attempt to sever the Jews from their land and heritage. Their heirs can be found in college classrooms, newsrooms, the United Nations, and Hamas command centers.

Indeed, both the Palestinian Authority, the Western-backed entity that rules over the majority of Palestinians, as well as Hamas, the Iranian proxy that controls the Gaza Strip, have vested interests in denying Jewish history. PA president Mahmoud Abbas has, like his predecessor Yasser Arafat, repeatedly denied a key historical fact: Jews come from Judea and Arabs from Arabia.

In fact, the Jewish presence in the land has been continuous, and it predates the Arab and Islamic conquests by millennia. But acknowledging this would present Zionism—the belief in Jewish self-determination in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland—as a "liberation movement." And this runs counter to those who hope to present Israel as an evil, imperialist transplant.

As Spielman ably documents, the anti-Israel movement is both vast and pernicious. They seek to rewrite history, erasing Jews, both literally and figuratively. In many respects, the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, in which Hamas and other Iranian proxies invaded Israel and murdered more than 1,200 people, is the culmination of that effort. It was the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. Hamas’s genocidal ambition didn’t come out of thin air.

The Holocaust, Auschwitz survivor Max Eisen famously warned, "began with words." That is: The organized and industrialized effort to rid the world of Jews was both legitimized and metastasized by language that made it all possible. Similarly, the effort to disconnect Jews from their ancient homeland is also, at its core, an effort to sanction the mass murder of Jews in the 21st century.

Accordingly, the meaning of the City of David goes beyond archaeology and history. The discovery of David’s ancient kingdom is a direct threat to the narrative that Jews have no place in Israel; that they are but "settlers" and, if implicitly, are at fault for the violence perpetrated against them. There is a reason that Hamas and its supporters at Ivy League universities and legacy media actively work to subvert or minimize the Jewish people’s connection to their land.

Some of the most illuminating passages in When the Stones Speak are Spielman’s encounters with the press, many of whom are seemingly as committed to removing the Jews from Judea as the terrorists whose claims they often carelessly echo. After all, they wouldn’t be the first to try—and fail—in their attempts. The Romans, the author reminds readers, are gone. But the Jews endure.

It's not an easy battle. But it is an essential one. And Spielman offers a reminder about where it all begins. The war against the Jewish people is ongoing. When the Stones Speak tells us that history is a battlefield, and Israel’s best weapon is the truth.

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, 273 pp., $30

Sean Durns is a senior research analyst at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.