Maariv (Hebrew only) reports that Baron Rothschild purchased thousands of acres of Syrian land in the 1920s that may today legally belong to the Jewish National Fund.
Rothschild’s real estate company, named Pika or Pekka, bought the lands and the ownership of most of that land was transfered in 1957 to the JNF. About 59,000 dunams (15,000 acres) were purchased – 6,000 in the Golan Heights and 53,000 in the plains of Haran, 35 kilometers from Damascus and near Bashir Assad’s palace (according to Palestine Today‘s report.) Taxes were paid on the land at least until 1942. If I am reading the article correctly, the Syrian Waqf in the 1940s tried to claim that this was Islamic land that was not legally allowed to be sold, and now Israeli lawyers are studying the matter to see if they still have any legal claim on the land.
