In a recent interview, US Ambassador Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, praised Israel for blooming the desert, claiming the land was barren and nothing grew there 50 years ago.
This is the Israeli narrative of a land without a people. Palestinians lived here and cultivated these lands long before Israel existed, with olive groves, orchards and fields that fed their villages and cities.
In the Nakba of 1948, about 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly deported and hundreds of their villages were ethnically cleansed. Many of the forests that Israel celebrates were planted over the ruins of those villages.