The settler group El-Ad is today one of the foremost non-state organizations working to cement Israeli state control over East Jerusalem. It conceives of its project as trying to undo the erasure of Jewish presence in the district of Silwan, just south of the Old City walls. In the underserviced and impoverished Silwan is found the famous and heavily excavated City of David archaeological site. In the Israeli historical imaginary, the City of David site is associated with the biblical foundation by King David of the first Jewish state (generally dated to 1000 BCE). El-Ad considers the continuing archaeological excavations to be unearthing a pre-existing material presence that can produce in Jews a desire to return to this sacred site. To help this “return,” El-Ad pursues several linked strategies: (i) taking control of properties in Silwan to settle Jewish residents, leveraging a juridical apparatus that weakens or nullifies Palestinian land tenure; (ii) expanding archaeological excavation, often on lands it controls; and (iii) giving tours of the archaeological site with the expressed intention of strengthening Jewish national ties to (East) Jerusalem. Silwani Palestinians actively resist these efforts, and their resistance is met with violent state repression. In response to this resistance, and to international condemnations, El-Ad elides the bureaucratic and institutional mechanisms that enable its settlement, claiming that it is only “buying houses” for Jews. This claim has been echoed by Israeli government officials in international arenas, most recently by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu while speaking to American journalists in Fall 2014. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the late nineties with El-Ad’s Visitor Center, as well as follow up visits, this paper examines the claim of “buying houses,” as it came up on tours and continues to resonate in international arenas. I situate the claim within a longer history of claims made by Zionist organizations about land purchases during the Mandate period. This colonial historicity—and the constant re-appearance in local and global sites of such historical narratives—is central, I argue, to how El-Ad reframes the materiality of Silwan’s current landscape. While this landscape currently displays the uneven development characteristic of East Jerusalem’s complex, colonial history, the claim to “buying houses” suggests a more benign process. The claim of buying houses is thus crucial to establishing support for Israeli policy in East Jerusalem, both at national and global scales.