The City of David national park is managed by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and is operated by the Elad Foundation. This is the only national park operated by a private political organization and not by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority. Several homes belonging to Palestinian residents of Silwan are trapped in the territory of the City of David site, along with homes of Jewish settlers owned by the Elad Foundation.
The City of David archaeological site has been excavated since the mid-19th century, and is the heart of ancient Jerusalem. Urban settlement on site evolved around the Gihon Spring in the Middle Bronze Age ) around 18th-17th BCE ( and continues to the present day.
The signage and site manuals focus primarily on two periods both of which are identified with Jewish history: the Judean Kingdom and the late Second Temple period. The narrow curation of the site provides the visitor with very partial information about the history of Jerusalem, its cultural material, and the sequence of settlements by the various cultures, religions, and ethnic groups. It emphasizes the era of King David’s reign, despite fierce controversy among researchers regarding the significance and existence of remains from that period.
The narrative bias uses archaeology as a tool to create new facts such as the authorization of a tourist hub with strong ethno-centric undertones (the Kedem Compound), changing the designation of a territory from a public area to tourist site (the Shiloah/Siloam Pool), and developing underground links between the various sites (the Stepped Street, the tunnel from the Givati Parking Lot to the Davidson Center, and others).