The ‘untamed wildernesses’ of Israeli and American colonialism http://mondoweiss.net/2011/08/the-untamed-wildernesses-of-israeli-and-american-colonialism.html

Israeli assertions that Zionism has made the "desert bloom" and that the Arabs were incompetent farmers have taken on the same justificatory tone (both moralsitic and scientific) as the untamed wilderness myth in the U.S. The blooming dessert meme also explains why the present water situation in Israel has become a major environmental issue and the Israelis have had to destroy so many Palestinian orchards - to conserve water, perhaps?

But these orchard demolitions reveal an inherent problem with the wilderness narrative: the land is inhabited. The Founding Fathers, though unhappy with Indian land claims, recognized that the natives did live there (duh, that was the whole problem!) and, obviously, since they lived there in numbers, knew that they were able to feed themselves. The "wilderness" mythology is, in fact, a largely modern invention in both Israel and America.

So how does one end up glossing over this? The simplest solution is for the people at the time to have already gone and created a "wilderness" through scorched earth tactics, as the 1779 Sullivan Expedition to the Ohio demonstrated. Largely forgotten today, it was launched four years into the American War for Independence and was regarded as an extremely important military effort at the time. George Washington himself ordered it, making it comparable to David Ben-Gurion's decision to launch the October 1948 invasion of Galilee. Like the Galilee operation, the Sullivan Expedition had been given the same objective: secure the territory for future settlement by evicting the native population.