The Truth about Jerusalem’s City of David – The Lies about Silwan - by Nadav Shragai

...it appears that, as in the case of the Temple Mount compound, the acrimony and slander concerning the City of David stem in part from the inability of the inciters to deal with the Jewish past of the site, which is adjacent to the heart of Jerusalem – the Temple Mount. At a time when Palestinians are rewriting the history of Jerusalem – both the Jewish and the Muslim history – and trying to prove that they were in the city before the Jews were (despite what modern research tells us), the City of David is for them another item in their large fabric of denial of any Jewish tie to Jerusalem, its sites, and its holy places.

Nadav Shragai..
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs..
Institute for Contemporary Affairs #624..
July '19..

On July 1, 2019, a photo of the U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, and U.S. envoy, Jason Greenblatt, striking a thin and symbolic wall with a sledgehammer – a wall built to separate two parts of the ancient Pilgrimage Road – became the headline of the whole event.

This is one of the most sensational archaeological discoveries to be made in Jerusalem since Israel’s establishment. On this road, which was remarkably preserved under the ashes of the Roman destruction, many thousands of Jews – according to the historical descriptions – walked in Second Temple times after a ritual bath in the Shiloah Pool about 700 meters from the Temple Mount.

Over the past five years, Israeli archaeologists have uncovered 350 meters of this road including numerous artifacts that bring back to life the last battle in Jerusalem, about 2,000 years ago, between the Jewish rebels and the Romans.

Friedman attended the dedication ceremony not only to express recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the City of David area, but also to admire a magnificent archaeological endeavor of the Israel Antiquities Authority, replete with discoveries and finds. Although this enterprise was dedicated by Israel on June 30, it began more than a hundred years ago at a site excavated by non-Israeli archaeologists, at a time when the State of Israel did not exist and Jerusalem was under Muslim rule.

Archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority, closely supervised by safety engineers (in line with the world’s strictest standards), have been searching for or excavating the Pilgrimage Road – mistakenly known as the Herodian Road – only since the beginning of the 2000s. But they and the Antiquities Authority are not the first to look for this road or excavate it. They were preceded in the period of Jordanian rule by the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, who uncovered the more northern parts of the Pilgrimage Road and also warned that the City of David should be excavated hastily before the Jordanians paved a road there – which is indeed what they eventually did. Kenyon was preceded by an archaeological research delegation during the period of the British Mandate. And this delegation was preceded at the end of the nineteenth century, in the time of Ottoman rule, by the archaeologists Jones Bliss and Archibald Dickie.

Before discussing the many discoveries from the new excavation, we first need to disprove the allegation that it endangers the homes of the residents of the Arab neighborhood of Silwan.

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