That’s correct. The Samaritans used to speak Samaritan Hebrew, then Samaritan Aramaic and then Palestinian Arabic which was then the main language for at least 800 years. However as I understand they have now mostly switched to Hebrew as they have integrated into the isreali state. This is however a very modern phenomenon.

Alfalfa is drought tolerant compared to other forage legumes like clover. This means that during drought the alfalfa will fare better and also yield better than clover or a grass like Timothy or blue grass. However as you can see pasture is also on that list you linked. Fodder crops are harvested for their entire biomass above ground and the amount of biomass is very large. It’s a very productive crop and makes a lot of fodder and this fodder is mostly water. Therefore it takes a lot of water to grow. The water required is not extreme in any way however and where I live alfalfa is a rainfed crop that only very rarely has any water deficiency symptoms. The extreme amounts of water applied to alfalfa in the south east of the USA is only because of the desert climate there. Growing beans, corn or potatoes there also requires insane amounts of water. If potatoes were chiefly grown in the desert southeast you bet you would see news articles going around about how terrible potatoes are. In the end it’s only a matter of matching the right crop to the right climate. Even the most water hungry crop on earth will not require irrigation in the most rainy place on earth.

Alfalfa is a great crop. It has deep roots which store carbon in the soil, it is drought tolerant, it’s high yielding and it’s nitrogen fixating meaning it improves the soil quality and does not require nitrogen fertilizer which normally is a huge carbon footprint. Overall fantastic crop if you need fodder for ruminant animals. The big problem is farming it on an absurd scale in the middle of the damn desert. Alfalfa does not require irrigation in regions with ample rainfall.

A lot of the Palestinians who live in northern isreal descend at least partly if not chiefly from Samaritans who converted to Islam and started speaking Arabic instead of Samaritan Hebrew. The modern Samaritans wouldn’t call themselves Palestinians however. They have their own identity and many of them don’t speak Arabic.

Even if one claims that there are white passing people there today only because of foreign conquests, then it’s important to remember those were also going on before Jesus was born. Most notably Jesus was born in the Palestine province of the Roman Empire. There is even a myth that his dad was a Roman soldier (there is no real evidence of this however). Before the Romans the Greeks ruled isreal after Alexander the greats conquest. So the flow of “white genes” to isreal did not start only after Jesus was born. So I don’t think it’s a good argument to say everyone was uniformly brown there back then but are all mixed today. That’s not true. You could argue however the procentage of white passing people have gone up since then.

The United States government does officially consider Middle Eastern people to be white for census purposes. However this does not mean that is what everyone else considers to be white. Benjamin Franklin famously considered only English and northern German people to be white, even excluding Scandinavians from white status. In the end it’s totally arbitrary where you draw the line. What is totally clear is that Jesus was not blond and blue eyed. Those traits were incredibly rare in the middle east both then and today. There is a chance however that Jesus was white passing as many people from the levant are today and probably were back then as well.

Here is a picture of modern day Samaritans who are a sister group to the Jews. They never left their homeland of northern isreal and are therefore probably close to the genetic makeup of ancient Jews.

Here is a picture of a modern day Lebanese classroom.

So it may be that Jesus looked like an Italian, could also be that he was one of the less white passing ones. But in the end does it really matter? The message of Jesus is the same no matter the case.