author, The Eagle and the Bible: Lessons in Liberty from Holy Writ, New English Review Press, 2012
http://www.amazon.com/The-Eagle-Bible-Lessons-Liberty/dp/0985439408/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345321257&sr=8-1&keywords=eagle+and+the+bible
Modern Israel has built itself up based on the principle of creating “facts on the ground” – a complete infrastructure for a functioning nation-state – regardless of sanction, or lack thereof, by the international community. But as important as these “facts on the ground are,” imagine, how important it is for the morale of Israelis, surrounded as they are by enemies intent on their annihilation, to come across “facts underground.” Imagine coming to the confirmed archaeological site of the city and, quite possibly, the palace of ancient Israel’s greatest potentate, the illustrious King David.
The name of the place is Silwan. It is a sleepy suburb of Arab east Jerusalem, with a population of 40,000 Arabs. These days, however, it is much less sleepy and much more confrontational. Why? Because Silwan is the location of a major archaeological site, advertised as the City of David (Ir David in Hebrew). It is part of a natural rocky outcropping extending southward from a ridge-like area known as the Ophel, that in turn connects with the south end of the Temple Mount. Long ago, in the twelfth century, BCE, there was a city here called Jebus, after the Jebusite tribe of Canaanites – the ones conquered by the biblical hero Joshua. According to the Bible, the city remained in Jebusite hands until being conquered by King David, somewhere around the tenth century BCE. This was the genesis of the city that is today known as Jerusalem.
Palestinian propagandists must undercut all of this. David and his memory must be minimized, if not erased from history. These detractors maintain that Silwan has been swamped with “militant” Jewish settlers, who claim it for Israel.15 In a television segment on the City of David, produced for the CBS program “60 Minutes,” correspondent Leslie Stahl observed that “the challenge is how to divide the city between the two sides.”
Oh really? The trouble with political correctness is that it’s repeated so often that everyone sheepishly gives assent, and facts are no longer at issue. But in fact, east Jerusalem doesn’t need to be claimed; it is already part of Israel, and has been since 1967. It was formally annexed by Israel’s “Jerusalem Law” of 1980, which declared, “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.” Those are the “facts on the ground.” Wars, like elections, have consequences. Israel didn’t just waltz in one day and seize Silwan. Israel was attacked in June, 1967, by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, along with Egypt and Syria. In spite of the fact that the Israeli government cabled King Hussein, urging him to stay out of the conflict, artillery fire was opened up along Jordan’s entire border with Israel. The fighting in Jerusalem was particularly brutal. In the end, however, east Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, and sleepy Silwan, fell to the Israelis. This was a defensive war, for Israel’s survival, and taking Silwan was matter of securing victory, not initiating an “illegal occupation.”
The facts underground, now being excavated after millennia of dusty silence, are of course seen by Israelis – “settlers” and ordinary citizens alike – as one more verification that “this land is ours!” Moreover, the underground facts are multiple. In the nineteenth century, famed British archaeologist Charles Warren came up with the shocking conclusion that the “real” City of David lay outside and well to the south of the medieval city walls we see today. In October, 1867, Warren explored a water conduit leading away from the natural spring to the east of the city called the Gihon.
In an Indiana Jones-type adventure, Warren and his team crawled hundreds of feet into this tunnel, occasionally up to their mouths in the water that still flowed. It is known today as Hezekiah’s Tunnel, built by the biblical king who lived two centuries after David, trying to defend Jerusalem against the Assyrian general about to besiege the city, Sennacherib. An ancient inscription in paleo-Hebrew, found midway through, verifies the details of the biblical story. It is yet another fact underground, testifying to Israelite presence in exactly this part of ancient Jerusalem.
But what about David? Is he anything more than an Arthurian-type legend? Of course this means something to Israelis, that goes well beyond archaeological interest. It goes to the meaning of why they are here in this land. Charles Warren noticed a cave-like chamber near the tunnel’s entrance at the spring. Clearing out the chamber with help from Arab workers, he found another tunnel, which he followed some forty feet, where it ended in a peculiar shaft the rose into the darkness. “Warren’s Shaft,” as it came to be called, has been the subject of much speculation through the years, giving rise to the notion that this might have been the very passageway used by young David and his men, to stealthily invade and conquer ancient Jebus.
Archaeologists have recently cast doubt over whether Warren’s Shaft could have been used to conquer the city, as it is virtually impossible to climb. But in 1995, as a new visitors’ center at the City of David was being constructed, salvage workers underground came upon a new secret tunnel. It lead down from the ancient city proper to a water pool, and was guarded by a massive wall and towers. Bypassing Warren’s Shaft entirely, this tunnel would have afforded a group of stealthy invaders – David and his men – a clear line of entrance into the Jebusite stronghold. Tiny shards of pottery littered about date this subterranean burrow to about two millennia before the Common Era, well before David lived, which means that it would have been there when the daring Israelites would have carried out their insurgency. We therefore have a bona-fide archaeological link to the conquest of Jerusalem, not by the ancestors of the Palestinian Arabs, but by by the distant forefathers of Israeli Jews.
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