On the other hand, Syria stole land from the Jews

Submitted by Thinker (United States), Jul 10, 2011 at 07:45

" Between 1891 and 1894, Baron Edmond James de Rothschild purchased nearly 80,000 dunams (30 miles sq.) of land consisting of 16 villages in southern Syria for Jewish settlement."

Note. The land was legally purchased. "Most of the land was situated in the eastern Golan and now lies a few kilometres from the 1967 lines, inside Syrian controlled territory. The parcels of land straddled both sides of the Nahr al-Allan. Over the years attempts to settle these lands was only partly successful and it remained sparsely populated by Jews. . . . "In 1899, the Pasha of Damascus expelled the Jews from all of Rothschild's estates.[50] Between 1904–08, a group of Crimean Jews settled in the Bethsaida Valley, initially as tenants of a Kurdish proprietor with the prospects of purchasing the land, but the arrangement faltered.[51][52] Jewish settlement in the region peated out over time, either due to Arab hostility and Turkish bureaucracy, disease or economic difficulties.[53] In 1921–1930, during the French Mandate, the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PJCA) obtained the deeds to the Rothschild estate and continued to manage it, collecting rents from the Arab peasants living there.[46] In 1944, the Syrian Land Settlement Campaign refused to recognize the foreign owned PJCA as the legal owners of the land and the Syrian government confiscated it without compensation on the grounds that "it was contrary to Syrian policy to allow Jews to own land in Syria."[46] The JNF still lays claim to the land.[46]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_Heights

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".