City of Stone deals with the city's old and modern history, its religious and urban sights, geographical and demographic changes and the claims and counterclaims of its communities. Chapter 2 examines the politics of map-making and the drawing of boundaries.
Religion is at the heart of the struggle over the city.
That is the question Benvenisti turns to in chapter 4, which surveys the various systems of municipal government from the Ottoman period to the present by which Jerusalem's rulers have sought to contain the conflicts threatening to tear the city apart. Exacerbating this conflict has been the systematic effort to promote a Jewish presence in the city at the expense of the Arab population. Chapter six focuses on demography, providing a concise history of population changes in the city from the Ottoman period to the present, looking in particular at Israeli attempts at demographic engineering in East Jerusalem since 1967. The chapter also analyzes class and ethnic divisions, finding that they largely overlap. In chapter seven, Benvenisti reviews various recent plans for resolving the Jerusalem question.