Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — right now.

Jewish-American journalist Norman Cousins once said, “History is a vast early warning system.” This week we speak with Oren Kessler, the author of “Palestine 1936,” who would likely agree. But as we see in Kessler's new book, history can also be a collection of missed opportunities.

“David Ben-Gurion, starting in about 1933-34, had a series of meetings with a man by the name Musa Alami and he and Ben-Gurion met again and again throughout the early mid-1930s and they come tantalizingly close to some sort of an agreement before everything goes wrong, as tends to happen,” Kessler said this week in Jerusalem's Nomi Studios.

Kessler’s new book is about the Arab Revolt that took place from 1936-1939. He argues, quite convincingly, that these years in British Mandate Palestine form the roots of the Middle East conflict. The book attempts to illuminate all three sides of the complex relationship between the British, Jews and Arabs attempting to occupy the Holy Land during these formative years.

Kessler is a journalist and political analyst based in  Tel Aviv. He spent five years researching and writing “Palestine 1936” and it’s clearly a labor he loved.

There are many lessons that have yet to be learned as we see this bloody history repeating itself in Israel, even today. So this week, we ask author Oren Kessler, what mattered then and why does that matter now?

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IMAGE: Journalist Oren Kessler, author of 'Palestine 1936' (Hadas Parush)