I intend to explore how archaeology in the parts of Jerusalem annexed by Israel following the Six-Day War has, over the last view decades, increasingly come under the purview of ideological non-governmental organizations, including the political and economic processes that informed transfers of authority from the Israeli government to private settler groups. In investigating the phenomenon of ‘settlement through excavation,’ I will consider, for example, what led to the Israeli government transferring total control for the historically-significant and politically-sensitive City of David park to Elad—whose stated mission is to settle Jews in occupied East Jerusalem—in 1997, a year after a dispute over archaeology in the Old City sparked severe violence that led to the deaths of numerous Palestinians and Israeli security forces. Further, I will consider the 1981 Protection of Jewish Holy Places act, which designates as a holy site any above-ground or underground passageway that can be entered from the Western Wall plaza, in the context of archaeological excavations conducted in contested territory. My paper also seeks to place archaeology in East Jerusalem within the broader context of identity and nation-making in the Israeli-Palestinian setting. It has been well established that the ideological organizations that have gained a foothold in Jerusalem’s archaeological scene have emphasized Jewish biblical history while excluding the histories of non-Jewish communities. Equally, there has been significant exposure of recent municipal plans to, for example, bulldoze parts of East Jerusalem’s Al-Bustan neighborhood in the interests of establishing the so-called “King’s Garden,” in an attempt to recreate a pre-exilic landscape from the time of King David and Solomon. The highlighting of Jewish biblical history in the interests of demonstrating Jewish connection to the land, and the occlusion of non-Jewish histories in the same territory, must be understood within the broader Israeli nationalist narrative of return and the consequent negation of the exile. Seen from this angle, then, archaeology as it is employed by ideological groups in East Jerusalem—with the implicit and explicit support of various arms of the Israeli government—contributes to a double erasure: on the one hand, the interim history of the “homeland,” whose main subjects were and are Palestinian Arabs; and on the other hand, the history of the diaspora, whose liquidation was held to be an instrumental part of the establishment of the modern State of Israel.