The story of Johnny Appleseed in the US is one of the most foundational settler colonial myths especially in the midwest. Very loosely based on the life of a real early settler and land speculator, the myth seeks to explain for early settlers why there were so many fruit trees all across the region. The myth goes that Johnny walked barefoot across the empty land, living off of nature and at every point he could, planting an appleseed to feed the settlers who would follow him. His myth served as an image of the ideal, masculine, agrarian settler who would tame the forests of this region and expand the growing United States.
This myth was told by later settlers not only to explain the abundance of Eurasian fruits like apples, but also to provide a settler origin for the wide abundance of native plants like squash and corn. The reality is that these fields which really did provide sustenance to early settlers unfamiliar with the region is that they were Indigenous food gardens. The Indigenous nations of this region had long since had extensive trade with the Spanish, French, and English which allowed them to import European crops which they planted right alongside their vast cornfields for decades prior to American invasion.
American armies invading the region in the 1790s would burn thousands of acres of these fields, the same genocidal tactics used by George Washington against the Six Nations during the revolution, but they could never come close to burning them all.
And so these tress which had been grown to sustain the tens of thousands of Indigenous people who lived in this region was now would feed invading settler families for a season or two before being chopped down with the surrounding wetlands drained to clear the land for the European style agriculture which still destroys this regions natural fertility to this day. Today not only is the tale told as a myth to children about the founding of America, but also used to sell products from organic fruit to ciders.
Now to flash forward about a century: early Zionist settlers in Palestine sought to build independent farming communities of Jewish settlers which could feed and sustain themselves. Earlier Jewish settlers in the region were highly dependent on Arab labor not only to feed themselves but also to house themselves and access basic commodities. To change this, organizations like the Jewish Colonisation Association and the Jewish National Fund bought large swaths of land to be developed (swamps drained, previously Arab villages torn down, forests planted) with the labor done primarily by settlers for those settlers to live on.
The term sabra came to be used for those Jewish settlers born in Palestine, primarily for the generation born in these recently made settlements under the British mandate. The sabra became an archetypal nationalist symbol for the type of the Jewish settler created by the Zionist movement as a bold, masculine, agrarian pioneer of what would become Israel. And it would gain even more prominence during the creation of the IDF in 1948 and the establishment of the state of Israel. This was the Nakba, where the IDF and other settler militias would burn villages, destroy native olive tree gardens, slaughter those that resisted, and send nearly 700k Palestinians into exile.
After the creation of Israel, the term sabra came to be used to market Israeli products to Europe and America. Thus, we get Sabra liquor and, as I'm sure you all know, the Sabra Dipping Company. Thus products native to Palestine and the wider region could be marketed and sold in Israel and other imperialist countries while exclusively benefitting Israeli companies and settlers.
Here we see two instances of settlers creating a masculine ideal to justify their existence and serve as propaganda for their expansion. And as the areas settlers invaded transitiones from primarily agrarian to industrial economies, these symbols become marketable images for their products to sell to each other. Settler-colonialism is the same no matter the century.
