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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HOW MARVEL MANAGED TO UPSET PALESTINIAN — AND ISRAELI — FANS  
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Li Zhou
July 28, 2024
Vox
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_ The controversy over Sabra, a new movie character, explained. _

Captain America shields on display during New York Comic Con on
October 12, 2023, in New York City. , Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for
ReedPop

 

Li Zhou [[link removed]] is a politics reporter
at Vox, where she covers Congress and elections. Previously, she was a
tech policy reporter at Politico and an editorial fellow at the
Atlantic.

_____

A new trailer
[[link removed]] has
reignited controversy over a comic book character Marvel Studios
intends to introduce onscreen in next year’s _Captain America:
Brave New World_, the fourth installment of the franchise.

The upcoming film will feature Ruth Bat-Seraph, also known by her
alter ego, Sabra. In the comics, Sabra is an agent for Mossad,
Israel’s intelligence organization, as well as a police officer in
Tel Aviv. The press release for the film, however, describes her as
a “high-ranking US government official,”
[[link removed]] an
apparent departure from her identity in the source material. Marvel
will also not be using the name Sabra in the film, according to the
Hollywood Reporter
[[link removed]].

The announcement of Bat-Seraph’s character and the updated
description that Marvel released
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spurred major pushback.

In 2022, when Bat-Seraph’s role in the next Captain America film was
publicized, pro-Palestinian activists urged a boycott
[[link removed]] of
the film — one that they’re still calling for
[[link removed].] —
over its inclusion of a superhero synonymous with the Israeli
government. For those who are pro-Israel, the recently revealed choice
to seemingly alter Bat-Seraph’s backstory as a Mossad agent felt
like an attempt to erase her Israeli heritage, though it’s not clear
that Marvel plans to do that.

What does seem evident is that Marvel wants “to have mass appeal,”
says Shama Rangwala
[[link removed]], a York University
assistant professor of humanities, “but will likely end up pleasing
no one” due to the concerns expressed by a range of viewers.

Who is Sabra?

Sabra made her debut in the Marvel comics in 1980 and has been in
roughly 50 comic books, says Kent Worcester, a Marvel expert who’s
written a book on the Punisher
[[link removed]],
a former Marine-turned-antihero.

From the get-go, Sabra was closely tied to Israel, in the same way
that World War II veteran Captain America was to the US. Her original
uniform was based on the Israeli flag, and in her role as a Mossad
agent, she helped carry out missions on the government’s behalf. In
the comics, she’s dubbed “Sabra, super heroine of the state of
Israel.”

[An image from one of Sabra’s early appearances in Marvel comics,
from Issue 256 of the Incredible Hulk.]
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An image from one of Sabra’s early appearances in Marvel comics,
from Issue 256 of the _Incredible Hulk_.

Marvel Comics

Sabra’s storylines were often “racist,” says Tariq Ra’ouf, a
culture writer who’s examined the character’s addition to the
Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU
[[link removed]].
“She represents this idea of trying to fight for good and trying to
‘fight terrorism,’ but then the terrorism that she’s always
fighting, it’s just happened to be Arabs and Muslims.”

In an early comic book appearance
[[link removed]],
Sabra confronts the Hulk because she thinks he’s aiding Arab
terrorists whose attack has killed civilians, including a Palestinian
child. After she tracks him down — and it becomes evident he
wasn’t aiding terrorists — the Hulk notes that Israel and
Palestine’s battle over the same land is fueling needless
casualties. “Boy died because boy’s people and yours both want to
own land! Boy died because you wouldn’t share!” Hulk exclaims.

As Ra’ouf writes, Sabra appears to have a realization about the
consequences of war, though that doesn’t necessarily change her
actions in subsequent stories.

Those comics often included problematic exchanges between Sabra and
fellow superhero Arabian Knight
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character who embodies a mishmash of racist stereotypes and with whom
Sabra clashed and worked. They also featured animus from Sabra toward
other Arab characters, seemingly driven by a Palestinian terrorist
group killing her son, a tragedy revealed in a later comic.

Sabra’s name is contentious as well. While it was chosen as a nod to
a native-born person in Israel, a nickname born of a prickly fruit of
a cactus common in the area, it’s also the name of a Palestinian
refugee camp in Lebanon where a horrific massacre took place in 1982
[[link removed]].
Though she was created as a character prior to the massacre, the name
nevertheless carries negative associations for many Palestinians and
their supporters.

Marvel has said the forthcoming Captain America movie will feature a
“new approach” to the character. That appears to include a
decision to omit the name of the character’s alter ego. The brief
description in the trailer release also states that she was a
“former Black Widow” prior to becoming a US government official.
Some viewers have interpreted that to mean that she’s now of Russian
descent, given the country’s “Black Widow” program in the MCU,
which spawned actress Scarlett Johansson’s Avengers character and
was central to the plot of an eponymous 2021 film.

However, characters of other nationalities have been trained in the
program, too. The character will be played by Shira Haas, an Israeli
actress who reportedly speaks with an Israeli accent
[[link removed]] in
the film. And reporting from The Wrap
[[link removed]] suggests
that she’ll be a Black Widow agent of Israeli descent.

“If true, we are glad that Marvel recognized how essential Sabra’s
Israeli identity is to her character,” the American Jewish Committee
wrote in a statement to the publication after previously expressing
concerns about changes that may have been made to her nationality.
“Superheroes have enough things to worry about. Identity politics
shouldn’t be one of them.”

THE CONTROVERSY, BRIEFLY EXPLAINED

The original decision to incorporate Sabra into the cinematic universe
was a shocking one, says Ra’ouf. The outcry was swift,
with Palestinian advocates saying it was the latest cultural effort
[[link removed]] to
glorify Israel’s policies and deeming the character
#CaptainApartheid. Marvel’s Sabra announcement also came at a tense
time in 2022,
[[link removed]] shortly
after heightened fighting between Hamas and the Israeli military the
year prior.

“I can’t quite wrap my mind around what Marvel’s cinema universe
executives were thinking when they thought this was a good idea,”
says Worcester. “The Marvel universe is full of characters, as is
the DC universe, some of them dating back to the ’40s and ’50s,
who for contemporary audiences raise all kinds of problems.” There
are tens of thousands of Marvel comics, and Sabra is a relatively
minor character, he notes.

The trailer release this month has only added to the initial response,
with pro-Israel advocacy groups expressing their concerns
[[link removed]] when
it appeared as if her Israeli heritage had been cut from her
backstory.

The “decision to strip the Israeli identity of Sabra is a betrayal
of the character’s creators and fans and a capitulation to
intimidation,” the American Jewish Committee, a pro-Israel
organization, said in an initial social media post
[[link removed]]. “Sabra is a
proud Israeli hero, and should be portrayed as such. Taking away such
a central part of her identity would be like making Captain America
Canadian.”

Thomas Doherty, an American studies professor at Brandeis University,
notes that there’s a long history of censoring Jewish characters in
films
[[link removed]] in
order to facilitate these movies’ distribution in markets like Nazi
Germany. There are worries that alterations to Sabra’s character add
to that. He said, too, that Jewish American creators and writers, like
Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel, and Joe Shuster, have played a central role in
establishing Marvel and creating many of the country’s most beloved
superheroes.

Ra’ouf said that he understood where many of these concerns stemmed
from and supported adding more Jewish characters to the MCU. But he
also called for a consideration of how featuring this specific
character is particularly harmful due to Israel’s brutal offensive
in Gaza in the wake of Hamas’s devastating October 7 attack, as well
as its past policies toward Palestinians. Israel’s current incursion
has left tens of thousands dead
[[link removed](24)01169-3/fulltext],
displaced thousands of families, and spurred a severe hunger crisis
[[link removed]].

He also noted that the particularly concerning issue was the original
character’s ties to Mossad, an “agency [that] has been harming
[[link removed]] and killing
[[link removed]] Palestinian
civilians
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decades.”

Marvel films have often contained political messaging

Marvel films have regularly sent messages glorifying the US’s
standing in the world and its ability to take down potential enemies.
See: Captain America’s confrontation of the Red Skull and defeat of
the Nazis during World War II in the original 2011 film or the
pro-America iconography in the first two _Iron Man_ movies.

“Marvel really does tend to romanticize the military and romanticize
US imperialism,” says Ra’ouf.

Some observers view the decision to add Sabra as yet another extension
of such ideas, and an effort that stresses the closeness of the
US’s relationship with Israel
[[link removed]],
something that’s been evident in the ongoing military aid America
has provided
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protests
[[link removed]].

“Most major studios in Hollywood are toeing the imperialist American
company line,” says Jeremy Meckler, a University of Minnesota
scholar who’s studied Marvel’s influence. “They tend to have a
not very nuanced view of crime, terrorism, and bad guys — and to
sort of promote a binaristic understanding in which there are good
guys, and there are bad guys, and the good guys represent us.”

* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Captain America
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* MARVEL
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