Wikipedia just says things like “X species native to North Africa and Europe”, which really isn’t specific enough, and looking up the various subgenera on Google isn’t providing much more information.
Best that I can tell, there are two species of rose native to Israel: the Rosa Phoenicia and the dog rose (Rosa Canina). Neither, however, look like the generally accepted image of how a rose is “supposed” to look.
Rosa x damascena (damask rose) has been grown in the Middle East for a long time, as the name (from “Damascus”) suggests. But AFAIK neither it nor any other rose species is originally native to what we now think of as the Middle East, although there are apparently some species originating as far east as Turkey and as far west as central Asia.
(Edit: Yes, Alessan is right that the dog-rose and Rosa phoenicia appear to be native in a large region including parts of western Asia, but not just Israel in either case. So there’s two Middle Eastern roses for you.)
Want a do-over on that?
The word for rose originates from Old Persian. The ancestors of the Iranians must have been the developers of the original rose cultivars, from the basal wild form that has only 5 petals, in very ancient times. You can tell how old the word must be from how far it has changed over time. The original Old Persian for rose was *wrda-. From this you can see the source of Arabic ward, Hebrew vered, and Greek rhodon (from archaic Greek wrodon, before the Greek /w/ disappeared altogether).
But the modern Persian form of this word is “gol” (earlier pronunciation: “gul”). That’s a hell of a lot of change for one little syllable. In glottochronology, the science of dating languages and language change, that is evidence of Persian origin. It’s been there the longest and has therefore changed the most.
How the heck do you get from wrda to gul? You know how in Germanic words starting with w-, when borrowed into French, it changes to gu-? (e.g. ward/guard, war/guerre, warranty/guarantee, etc.) Same thing happened here. Also the protohistory of Indo-Iranian languages features instability of /r/ and /l/, where the one often (but not always) turns into the other. The final /d/ weakened to a fricative /δ/ and then dropped out altogether over time, and the vowel /a/ shifted to /u/ or /o/ under the influence of the original w-.
Is there a correlation between the Persian *wrda- and whatever the original Proto-Indo-European root was for the English word *red *and all of the Indo-European cognates?
They look to me pretty much like wild roses are supposed to look (granted, I know only of one kind that happened to grow in the area where I was brought up).
And just for the record, it seems the 'Rose of Sharon’ is something that’s sounded good to poets and songwriters, but doesn’t seem to refer much to any real roses.
It does come from an IE root, but not the one for red. The Proto-IE source *wrdhos is thought to be the word for sweetbriar or some kind of bramble. I also saw a reference to an Old English word for thornbush (coincidentally “word,” a homonym of the word word) derived from *wrdhos. The primitive root of *wrdhos is thought to mean ‘to grow’, and at one time I thought it might be related to English “wild.”
Red is traced back to Proto-IE *rowdhos, from the root **rewdh*-. They’d be pretty close, except for the initial w- in *wrdhos.