After Israel waged war against an Iranian regime that has vowed to destroy the Jewish state and diaspora Jews face a heightened atmosphere of antisemitism stemming from the Israel-Gaza war, a new book aims to equip Israel supporters with “a foundation” to refute claims that Jews do not have ancient roots in the land of Israel. 

When the Stones Speak: The Remarkable Discovery of the City of David and What Israel’s Enemies Don’t Want You to Know, written by former IDF spokesperson Doron Spielman, does so by recounting discoveries made in Israel’s largest excavation site, the City of David, where Spielman has worked closely with archaeologists for two decades to uncover and promote the site’s historical significance.

The book, Spielman suggested in an interview with Jewish Insider, is aimed at what he calls “the middle group of people” — “logical, reasonable people” who don’t know whether they’re pro-Israel or anti-Israel. “When they understand that ‘when the stones speak,’ they tell the story of the truth of the Jewish people’s connection to the land,” that could help sway the conversation on college campuses. This middle group will come to understand, he said, that “at the very least [the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] is a fight between two people who think they’re indigenous, and at the very best they understand the Jews are people who have only one land, they’ve been there for 3,800 years and therefore they have a right to defend it.”

That understanding “will have not only a huge impact on [the rise of antisemitism on college] campuses,” Spielman said, it “will have a huge impact on the Jews on those campuses. Jews on campus need to be able to stand on a foundation of truth that Israel is in fact their land. Without this knowledge, they cannot make that statement.”​​

Spielman hopes the book’s impact will also reach supporters of New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, the presumptive winner of the city’s Democratic primary last week, amid his refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” and denial that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. 

“He’s denying the Jewish people their right to live as a nation in the one place they ever called home,” Spielman told JI. “When the Stones Speak cuts through the lies with facts on the ground — literally.” 

Spielman, who lives in Jerusalem, wrote the book’s first draft before Hamas launched its Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel. Before the massacre, he had planned to meet with his editor on Oct. 8, 2023. That was put on hold when he was drafted into the reserves for 100 days. “When I came back to the book, I understood how far Hamas was willing to go with its ideology,” Spielman said. “If they aimed to erase our history, then the next thing they were going to try to do was erase us as a people.” So in light of Oct. 7, he reedited the entire book — which made it to The New York Times bestseller list just weeks after its May 13 publication.

“This is not just an academic debate, this is a battlefront,” Spielman continued. “The Jewish people need to understand and own our identity. This is critical — literally life and death — for Jews and Israel supporters to understand this because this is exactly what our enemies are fighting against.”

Since Israel launched its preemptive military campaign against Iran — a move that Spielman said “will prevent a major [worldwide] escalation later on with China,” which backs Tehran — Spielman said that the message of his book has become even more critical. It comes as the Iranian regime has been at the forefront of the effort to deny Jewish connections to ancient Israel. 

“The Quds Force, which is the long arm of Iran and provides support for Hezbollah, Hamas, militias, is based on the very principle that the faith the ayatollahs want to establish reaches all the way to Jerusalem and replaces completely what they call the Zionist state,” Spielman said. “It’s not by chance that Hamas, which is a child of Iran, has taken this idea of denying Jewish history and translated it into absolutely the educational indoctrination of every Palestinian in Gaza and the West Bank, [who] are taught that Jews have no connection to their history in Jerusalem.”

Amid a rise of antisemitism in America, Spielman is hopeful that the book will help combat the movement by left-wing groups to equate the Zionist movement with “settler colonialism.”  

“If we’re looking to understand why Jews are being attacked on campuses, it’s the same ideology of denying the connection between Jews and Jerusalem — that is exactly what is erupting on campuses, the claim that we are settlers and colonialists,” he said. “I wrote this book before Oct. 7 in order to establish firmly that we have the archaeological proof that the Jewish people are more indigenous to Israel than any people are in any area of the world today. We have an unbroken chain.”

Spielman expressed hope that the discoveries and insights from the City of David eventually make their way into textbooks used in American middle and high schools. He also called on the U.S. Department of Education to work proactively to ensure that students are taught about the historic ties of the Jewish people to the land of Israel.

He pointed to one of his findings from several years ago at the entrance of the City of David: the seals of two ministers who in the Book of Jeremiah tried to kill the namesake prophet.

“A massive campaign erupted throughout the Muslim world denying the legitimacy of these findings,” Spielman said. “They also realized what a threat this was to the narrative of the Palestinians which was claiming that the Jews have no connection and therefore they began identifying the City of David as a massive settlement effort, never mentioning the name of the City of David. It’s amazing that they did this because they realized that they can’t stop the archaeology so they tried to stop the entire site … [The] bottom line is that all of the claims that Jews are settlers shatter when they are held up over the bedrock of the City of David and the discoveries we’ve made.” 

Spielman noted that City of David excavations have “widespread acceptance” across the political spectrum in Israel, with politicians from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Yair Lapid, the opposition leader, having visited the site.  

“Within the standard Israeli electorate, the City of David is really a central place of Israeli identity today and therefore the budget is funded by private individuals around the world as well as Israeli tax dollars,” Spielman told JI. 

He urged world leaders to visit as well. “For the same reason that Washington, D.C., is the historical site that you want every diplomat from around the world to see, a diplomat that comes to Israel that only goes to Yad Vashem [Israel’s Holocaust museum] is only getting five years of the Jewish story of exile. When you go to the City of David, you’re getting 2,000 years.”  

At the City of David, there is “something deeper than modern-day geopolitics,” Spielman said. “There is a claim here that goes to the heart. It’s something Israelis have ignored for a long time. We cannot stand strong about our rights to the land of Israel unless we understand the very foundations of our connections to the land. Archaeology, DNA, ancient texts and the stones of Jerusalem prove what history already knows— the Jewish people are not colonizers in their homeland.” 

“It’s not enough to talk about how we carry out our military and that we’re a moral army. We have got to go back to the reason we’re here.”