Consul General Donald Blome is an avid hiker. For some reason, he has decided to ignore Israeli hiking trails in Judea and Samaria, and instead is making his way across the “Masar Ibrahim Al-Khalil,” or the Ibrahim Path, an Arab trail that runs from northern Samaria to southern Judea.

The website of the US Consulate General in Jerusalem quotes Blome as explaining that “this journey is all about exploring the connection of the people with the land.” But he’s not talking about the Jewish people, who have a 3,000-year-old connection to the land through which he is hiking. Instead, Blome has in mind the “connection” of people who only started calling themselves “Palestinians” in the last century, and who — in many cases — are actually the descendants of Egyptian, Syrian or Lebanese Arabs who arrived in the 1920s and 1930s.

Blome began his hike in the Arab village of Rummana, north of Jenin, and will conclude in “the Old City of Hebron,” as he calls it. There will be no stops along the way at the sites that genuinely demonstrate the ancient connection between the Jewish people and the land — such as Shiloh, the first resting place of the biblical tabernacle and the center of Jewish religious life before the building of the First Temple. Nor will the consul general be visiting Beit El, where the patriarch Jacob had his famous dream of the angels ascending and descending to heaven.

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Blome appears to have forgotten that the Jewish presence in that “Old City of Hebron” is a lot older than that of the Muslims. The Jewish connection dates back to Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of the Patriarchs. Muslims did not show up in the area until more than 2,000 years later.

For some reason, the US Consulate is determined to wipe out Jewish history in the Holy Land. I suppose one could say that this is consistent with the recent decision by UNESCO to brand the Cave of the Patriarchs a “Palestinian” historical site. But it’s not the kind of behavior we were expecting from a representative of President Donald Trump’s administration. (Blome assumed the consul general post in July 2015, during President Barack Obama’s tenure.)

While promoting one myth, however, Blome has unintentionally exposed another.

Few Americans have heard of the “Ibrahim Trail.” Based on what they read in the newspapers — and what they hear from former US envoys such as Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk — the American public is led to believe that Israel “occupies” the Palestinians, “controls their movement” and “prevents their access” to neighboring communities.

Yet thousands of Palestinian hikers each year traverse the Ibrahim trail without interruption for 200 miles, proceeding “from the Masar Ibrahim Al-Khalil is a trail that runs through the West Bank from the Mediterranean olive groves of the highlands of the north to the silence of the deserts in the south, from the area west of Jenin to the area south of the Sanctuary of Abraham (known in Arabic as Al-Haram Al-Ibrahimi) in the city of (Hebron),” as the US Consulate’s website describes it.

Where are all the Israeli “occupation” troops? Where are the checkpoints that supposedly make the lives of Palestinians miserable? Where’s all the persecution, oppression and humiliation that we’re always reading about?