Goodreads asked Oren Kessler:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Oren Kessler I hope this book can illuminate a forgotten but hugely formative chapter in Israeli and Palestinian history, and of the Middle East conflict itself. I argue that many facets of that conflict’s “template” took shape not in 1967, when Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza, nor even in 1948, when the Jewish state was born, but a decade before. It was then that Palestine’s Arabs first united in concerted action against a common foe: Zionism and its midwife the British Empire. It was then that Palestine’s Jewish community became a force to be reckoned with militarily, economically, and demographically. And it was then that momentous concepts like “Jewish state” and “two-state solution” first appeared on the diplomatic agenda.

I won’t be so bold as to claim that learning about this period will magically solve the Middle East dispute, but I do argue that it fills some crucial historical gaps in understanding how we’ve reached this point of apparently endless discord and hopelessness.

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