Israel made the desert bloom.

"Making the desert bloom" is a textbook colonial claim, not a unique Israeli one. Every colonial project has justified itself by insisting it brought civilisation, development, and progress to a backward and neglected land. The British said it of India, the French of Algeria, settlers of the Americas and Australia. The claim always performs the same function: it recasts theft as improvement and dispossession as generosity, asserting the coloniser's superiority over people portrayed as too primitive to use the land properly. Beneath the imagery of gardens and irrigation sits the premise that natives were wasting their own homeland and deserved to lose it.

Before 1948, Palestine was a densely inhabited, cultivated land with a thriving agricultural economy, functioning cities, ports, railways, schools, hospitals, and newspapers. Jaffa was one of the world's major exporters of citrus, its Jaffa oranges famous across Europe long before Israel existed. Palestinians farmed olives, wheat, grapes, and almonds across terraced hillsides that had been worked for centuries. Cities like Haifa, Jaffa, Acre, and Nablus were centres of commerce, culture, and learning. The "empty desert" is not a description of Palestine. It is a colonial fiction invented to erase the people who were already there.

What actually transformed the land was destruction, not cultivation. Between 1947 and 1949, Zionist militias, the Haganah, Irgun, and Stern Gang, alongside the departing British, ethnically cleansed and destroyed around 530 Palestinian villages and towns, expelled 750,000 people, and killed some 15,000 in more than 70 massacres. Entire cultivated landscapes were emptied and their inhabitants barred from returning. Mass plantings of non-native European pine, promoted by bodies like the Jewish National Fund, were used to cover the ruins of depopulated villages. These forests acidified the soil, displaced indigenous species, and became fire-prone. The "bloom" was laid over the rubble of a society deliberately erased.