Desolate part of the globe? Are you serious? Do you know of the great forest of Lebanon? The cut all the trees down and burned them for fuel or built things with them. Originally this was a beautiful area.
You missed the point. The point is not whether Isreal used to be pretty.... maybe it was. The point is there is no mention in the bible of anything or anyplace not already known to exist. No mention that most of the world's population lived somewhere else, that most of the world's land mass was across oceans, on a round earth that rotated around the sun... Something that would indicate a divine knowledge above and beyond the knowledge base of the time. It appears to have been written in a bubble.