Refers to the attributions by the combatants on both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict of political content to the sacred structures in the contested area, and to the inseparability within the conflict of architectural form and violence.

It is here, he claims, that sacred spaces became sites for rewriting the cultural politics of Modernity. Drawing on the unpublished archives of the family of Ernest Tatham Richmond, an architect and former Chief Secretary for Political Affairs to the British government in Palestine, Monk relates to the restoration of the Dome of the Rock to what he deems the chief historical crisis of architecture - that politics is presumed to use representations of holiness as fronts for its secular goals.The discourse following the violent Wailing Wall riots of 1929, when the opponents in Palestine were compelled to explain their own national imperatives through duelling interpretations of the cause of the conflict serves to demonstrate how the interpretations of others are reinterpreted, which constitutes the ultimate paradox of politics.

Contents - The Foundation Stone of our National Existence
Part One - Stone
A Hieroglyph Designed by God
Part Two - Tile
An Unmistakable Sign
You Are Blind to the Meaning of the Dome of the Rock
Cataclysm and Pogrom - An Exergue on the Naming of Violence
Part Three - Paper
Sir Alfred Mond's After Dinner Eloquence
Designs on our Holy Places
Part Four - Conclusion
A Terrible Caricature