An Aesthetic Occupation: The Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestinian Conflict. (Terrible Episodes).

By Daniel Monk. London: Duke University Press. 2002. [pounds sterling]14.50

At the heart of this book there is an interesting examination of some of the actions of Ernest Richmond, an architect and sometime partner of Herbert Baker, but also an anti-Semitic hysteric and Bellocite Catholic convert, who used his position within the British Mandatory government of pre-Israel Palestine to cause trouble between the Arab and Jewish populations of Jerusalem. Richmond was involved in the escalation of an Arab claim that the Zionists were poised to destroy the Dome of the Rock: a claim based on naive drawings from Zionist folklore and a literal interpretation of a metaphor used by Alfred Mond in an after-dinner speech. He also lobbied incessantly and improperly, but successfully, for the promotion of Muhammed Hajj Amin al-Husayni (subsequently Hitler's greatest ally in the Middle East) to the post of Grand Mufti.

Unfortunately, this terrible episode in the great heroic tragedy that was the British involvement in Palestine is buried in page after page of apparently meaningless drivel presumably following the latest fashions in literary criticism. Monk defines his argument thus: 'Architecture itself assembles and reassembles the constellation of possible positions actually assumed by participants in this conflict, who confront die element of the nonidentical within architecture as if that element were the trace of the agency of the Other, that is, as if each threat to an immediately intuited reality confirmed by an object emanated from an opposing presentation of immediacy, rather than from the fact that the object's "identity" only introduces itself "in its otherness to all identification"'. Imagine 130 pages like that. Suspiciously, the lengthy footnotes contain whole episodes, rather as if the author were unable to integrate them properly into his text; and an enormous bibliography includes references (such as to A.J . Sherman's magnificent Mandate Days) which make no appearance whatsoever in the text or footnotes.