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.
In 1899, the Pasha of Damascus expelled the Jews from all of Rothschild's estates.
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.
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.
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." The JNF still lays claim to the land.