The Middle East is imploding, the Arab Spring is a memory, Syria is a surreal nightmare, yet a new attempt, brokered by the Obama Administration, is under way to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Can this new drive succeed where previous attempts have failed? It’s possible that the answer can be found in the history of Lydda, a small Palestinian city, now known as Lod, which lies east of Tel Aviv and west of Ramallah and Jerusalem––the very epicenter of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Anyone striving for Middle East peace must acknowledge the tragedy of Lydda and comprehend its implications.

In 1905, two years after Zionism first arrived in the Lydda Valley, a Jewish Russian entrepreneur built an olive-oil-soap factory, later named Atid (Hebrew for “future”), near the city. Shortly afterward, on the slope above the factory, a well-known Zionist teacher established an orphanage, called Kiryat Sefer, for the survivors of the pogrom in Kishinev, in Bessarabia. In 1908, members of the Zionist movement planted the Herzl Wald olive groves, commemorating its founder, Theodor Herzl, and, in the following two years, Zionists set up an artisan colony and an experimental agricultural farm. All those enterprises failed, except one—Ben Shemen, a “youth village” established by a doctor named Siegfried Lehmann.

Lehmann was born in Berlin in 1892. He studied medicine and then served in the German Army as a doctor. Although he was the son of a wealthy family of assimilated German Jews, he rediscovered his Jewish identity during the First World War and found meaning in an attempt to revive Judaism. In 1916, he established a center for homeless Jewish children in an East Berlin slum and, in 1919, opened a shelter for Jewish war orphans in the Lithuanian city of Kovna. Inspired by Martin Buber and Albert Einstein, Lehmann believed that there was no future for Jews in Germany, and that Western Jewry must reconnect with the traditions and rituals of Eastern Jewry.

By 1925, Lehmann realized that a rising wave of anti-Semitism would prevent him from maintaining his children’s home in Kovna. He decided that there was no place to go but Palestine. On a rainy day in January, 1927, he arrived with his wife and a group of Kovna orphans in the courtyard that had been built for the Kishinev orphans in the Lydda Valley some twenty years earlier.

By 1946, Lehmann’s educational institution had more than five hundred students. On the gentle slope from the courtyard of Kiryat Sefer down to the ruins of the soap factory, long, red-roofed dormitories had been built. The founders put up a school, dug a swimming pool, and planted flower gardens. The students raised poultry, cattle, sheep, and horses; they cultivated an orange grove, a vegetable garden, wheat fields, apiaries, and a vineyard. In the Lydda Valley, Lehmann developed one of early Zionism’s most welcoming sites.

Lehmann was not a narrow-minded Zionist. Although he dedicated his life to homeless Jewish children, he viewed his humanitarian mission in a broader historical context. He believed that, in the twentieth century, displacement and detachment were not solely Jewish maladies. He wanted Zionism to suggest a cure both for the modern Jewish people and for modern man; he wanted it to fulfill an urgent national task in a manner that would benefit all humanity. In his view, Zionism should be a settlement movement that was not tainted by colonialism or chauvinism, a progressive movement that was not distorted by urban alienation. He believed that Zionism should not establish a closed-off, condescending colony in Palestine that ignored its surroundings and its Arab neighbors; it should not be an Occidental frontier fortress commanding the Orient. On the contrary, it must somehow plant the Jews in their ancient homeland in an organic fashion, becoming a bridge between East and West. Though he never said so explicitly, Lehmann saw his Lydda Valley youth village as an example of what Zionism ought to be: a place that would give a home to the homeless, provide roots to the uprooted, and restore meaning to life. Ben Shemen would offer harmony to the children there and to an era that had lost all harmony.

Six months after Lehmann established the youth village, an earthquake demolished much of the old town of Lydda and killed scores of residents. Lehmann rushed to the city to attend to the survivors. His work had a profound impact, and over the years he made friends among Lydda’s Palestinian gentry and among the dignitaries of the neighboring Arab villages of Haditha, Dahariya, Gimzu, Daniyal, Deir Tarif, and Bayt Nabala. He saw to it that the villagers walking to and from Lydda in the summer heat could have cool water and refreshing shade at a fountain that he built for them at the gate of the Zionist youth village. Lehmann instructed the local clinic to give medical assistance to Palestinians who needed it. He insisted that the students of Ben Shemen, aged ten to eighteen, be taught to respect their neighbors. Almost every weekend, the students went on trips to the villages and frequently visited the schools and the market in Lydda. Arab musicians and dancers were invited to participate in the youth village’s festivals.

In 1947, just before the establishment of Israel, Lehmann asked the director Helmar Lerski to shoot a film about a young boy, a Holocaust survivor, who arrives from Europe and finds a life, and a purpose, in Ben Shemen. Lerski agreed, and called the film “Adama” (“Land”). Lehmann conceived of the film as a fund-raising tool, portraying an almost impossibly idyllic commune: boys and girls who had barely escaped Europe living in a progressive, democratic educational establishment; a kind of convalescent home for the uprooted youth of an uprooted people in the land of the Bible. Here were young Hebrew shepherds herding sheep on the craggy, ancient hills between Haditha and Dahariya. Here were young weavers spinning yarn on spindles as if they were French or German villagers who had been living on the land for generations. Here was a community of orphans living in a Euro-Palestinian village culture that was at peace with the land it had just descended upon. On Friday evenings, the children wore white shirts and gathered around tables to light candles. Some played Bach, some sang hymns, some recounted Jewish legends or tales from Tolstoy.

But, just after Lerski finished shooting his film, an inner tension between Zionism’s Lydda Valley enterprise and the Palestinian city of Lydda became apparent. In February, 1947, the British decided to leave the Holy Land and let the United Nations determine its fate. In June, an eleven-member U.N. special committee arrived in Palestine and, while touring the country, visited Ben Shemen and the Lydda Valley. The members concluded that there was no chance that the Jews and the Arabs of Palestine could coexist as one nation; they recommended dividing the land into two states. In November, the U.N. General Assembly endorsed the partition plan and, in Resolution 181, called for the establishment of two states, a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Arab League and the Arabs of Palestine were not willing to accept Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine and rejected the resolution.