Unearthing the Hasmoneans: The Hanukkah-Era Wall That Speaks to Israel’s Present

Archaeology rarely makes headlines. But every so often, a discovery surfaces that does more than illuminate the past — it clarifies the present.

The newly uncovered Hasmonean wall beneath Jerusalem’s Tower of David is one of those finds. It is not simply another artifact to be cataloged and displayed. It is a stone witness — silent but immovable — to the long and relentless Jewish struggle for sovereignty in this land. And at a time when Israel’s legitimacy is contested, distorted, or denied outright, its discovery could not be timelier.

The wall dates to the Maccabean period, an era historians often reduce to a footnote and schoolchildren remember as the backstory to Hanukkah.

But the Hasmoneans were not cartoon heroes resisting cartoon villains. They were political actors navigating the brutal geopolitics of their age — Judeans wrestling for autonomy against a Hellenistic empire, fighting over the right to govern themselves, to worship freely, and to determine their own future.

Now, we have physical confirmation of one of their defensive fortifications in Jerusalem: a wall built by Jews to defend Jewish Jerusalem — before Rome, before Byzantium, before the Caliphates, before the Crusaders. A wall predating every empire that later claimed this city while attempting to erase, reinterpret, or overwrite the people who first built it.

Archaeology vs. Historical Denial

What makes this discovery especially resonant is that it arrives amid a renewed wave of historical denial. Those who insist the Jewish connection to Jerusalem is a modern fabrication — colonial, foreign, or imposed — must now deny a structure that predates Islam by seven centuries and the Arab conquest by nearly a millennium. 

The Hasmonean wall does not tell the whole story of Jerusalem; no single find ever could. But it does something powerful nevertheless: it joins a growing archaeological record that makes historical erasure impossible without embracing absurdity.

Modern Zionism did not arise in a vacuum. It was not conjured only out of poetry, yearning, or trauma — though it contains all those things. It emerged because the Jewish people, after millennia of statelessness and persecution, sought to restore something they had already built before.

The Hasmoneans were the first Jews in recorded history to achieve independent governance in Jerusalem after exile. Their reign was imperfect, but imperfection does not negate legitimacy. The point is not to romanticize them; the point is to recognize them.

The core struggle of the Hasmoneans — to maintain Jewish self-determination amid hostile regional forces — is the same struggle Israel faces today. The enemies have changed in name, flag, and rhetoric, but their aims are eerily familiar: to sever Jews from their homeland, define Jewish identity as illegitimate, and deny Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel and Jerusalem.

Archaeology as a Battleground

Archaeology has become one of the most contested battlegrounds in the war over historical narrative — not because the artifacts are ambiguous, but because they are inconvenient. Every discovery that affirms Jewish antiquity threatens ideological projects built on the absurdity of denying it.

That’s why the politics around archaeology in Jerusalem will only intensify. Every trowel of earth is now an act of testimony. And every stone uncovered has the potential to expose those who insist — against all evidence — that Jewish sovereignty here is a colonial intrusion rather than the restoration of indigenous rights.

The Hasmonean wall does not resolve today’s political conflicts. But it does something essential: for those who don’t embrace the absurd, it places today’s debates within the only frame that makes them intelligible — the long arc of Jewish peoplehood in this land.

Jewish sovereignty in Judea is not new. It is the restoration of something ancient and indigenous. And Jerusalem is not simply the symbol of that recovery; it is the evidence of it.

As more sections of the city are excavated, they continue to tell the same story: the Jewish return to Zion is not an invention of modern nationalism. It is the latest chapter in an ongoing project — undertaken by ancestors who built walls to defend their freedom and by descendants who must still do the same.

And there is no time of year when this truth resonates more clearly than Hanukkah, a holiday too often reduced to merely candles and gifts. Hanukkah is, at its core, the celebration of Jewish sovereignty reclaimed, defended, and rededicated. It commemorates a people who refused to surrender their identity, faith, or homeland. The Jewish presence in Jerusalem is not a modern miracle, but an ancient one — rekindled across millennia.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.