Why Marvel Fans Are Concerned About Israeli Superhero Sabra’s Addition to the MCU

During the recent D23 Expo, Marvel hit fans of its long-running mega-franchise with a shocker: the casting of Israeli actress Shira Haas (Netflix’s Unorthodox) in Captain America: New World Order as the superheroine Sabra. It wasn’t the character’s obscurity that had people talking. After all, announcing C-list superheroes is the bread and butter of Disney’s perpetual hype machine. It was, instead, the nature of the character in question.

Sabra, you see, is Marvel’s Israeli supersoldier. And Sabra is a mess. As a character she is, frankly, unhinged; as a concept, she’s a perfect example of the perils of creating a flat nationalist hero as a fantasy stand-in for a very real, very ugly conflict.

Sabra made her first appearance in 1980, in an issue of The Incredible Hulk written by Bill Mantlo and drawn by Sal Buscema. (Neither man was Jewish—a note at the beginning of the issue credits Belinda Glass—first wife of Marvel editor Mark Gruenwald—with the initial character concept.) Sabra, whose real name is Ruth Bat-Seraph, is introduced as a Mossad agent and the product of a secret Israeli supersoldier program. Like Captain America, her outfit is a pastiche of patriotic symbols: a white and blue body suit, complete with a quilled cape that allows her to fly and a huge Star of David on her chest. The name “Sabra” itself has multiple resonances. While it directly refers to the country’s iconic prickly pear cactus—tzabar in Hebrew, sabr in Arabic, and a plant with a North American origin—it’s also slang for an Israeli-born Jew, and a symbol of Israel’s national self-conception: sweet to its friends, tough and prickly to its enemies.

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Prickly is the correct word where Sabra is concerned. The Incredible Hulk #256 finds Bruce Banner—who’s on the run from U.S. forces trying to capture him—in Israel, where he befriends Sahad, a plucky Palestinian street kid. After Sahad is killed in a cafe bombing carried out by Arab terrorists, a furious Banner transforms into the Hulk and attacks the men responsible. Sabra shows up late, assumes that the Hulk is somehow in league with the men he’s beating up, and attacks him.

The ensuing battle is not exactly a triumph for Sabra: paralyzing darts and a flying cape only get you so far against the Hulk. But what really puts a stop to the battle is an infuriated Hulk forcing Sabra to look at Sahad’s body. “Boy died because Boy’s people and yours both want to own land!” the Hulk rages at her. “Boy died because you wouldn’t share!”

In the closing panels, Sabra falls to her knees before the boy’s body, forced for a moment to reconsider her own aggressive nationalism. “She is, after all, an Israeli super agent…a soldier…a weapon of war,” Mantlo’s narration intones. “But she is also a woman, capable of feeling, capable of caring. It has taken the Hulk to make her see this dead Arab boy as a human being.”

It’s an odd moment in an odd, rather politically jumbled comic. (Sahad has been killed by a militant bombing, not by Sabra and not during her battle with the Hulk.) Yet the Hulk’s words clearly hit home to a woman who has, throughout the issue, spoken of Arab people only as terrorists and butchers. Here, she is forced to consider the fact that people she’s been fashioned into a weapon against are not a monolith—and in doing so, touches an aspect of her that she’s suppressed. As Mantlo puts it: “It has taken a monster to awaken her own sense of humanity.”

Unfortunately, subsequent appearances suggest that Sabra’s humanity has a tendency to hit the snooze button. In the 1982 miniseries Contest of Champions, she ends up feuding with her (astoundingly stereotypical) teammate Arabian Knight. She’s likewise in fine jingoistic form during a 1991 rematch with The Hulk, whom she’s accidentally rendered speechless. “I’m small and you’re huge… but so is Israel small, and we stand up against our enemies!” (“Terrific,” the Hulk thinks. “I’m not fighting a woman, I’m fighting the Zionist recruiting board.”) And in a much later appearance, in 2006’s Union Jack, Sabra interrupts an early team meeting by immediately questioning the trustworthiness of the new Arabian Knight.

But Sabra’s wildest role came in 1995, in issues #58-59 of New Warriors written by Evan Skolnick and drawn by Patrick Zircher. The Israeli supersoldier turns up to protect Yitzhak Rabin, the fifth prime minister of Israel, at a peace summit. She is not, alas, on her best behavior—she immediately gets into it with Batra, her Syrian counterpart, because Sabra is fundamentally incapable of not starting shit when an Arab person is in the room. We do, at least, learn why: Her son, she explains, was lost to a bombing by the Palestine Liberation Organization, and she essentially holds all Arabs responsible.

For all the obviousness of the character note—and the fact that it essentially erases her moment of realization at Sahad’s body—it’s also pretty revealing about how Skolnick conceives of Sabra as a character. Skolnick’s Sabra is driven by pain and old grievances, sharpened to a point and aimed outward. In this she once again stands in for Israel, a nation founded in part out of the trauma of the Holocaust and the general persecution of the Jewish Diaspora. “Peace is all we’ve ever wanted,” she mutters.

It’s also usually the first thing to get thrown out the window. Sabra’s pain is immediately weaponized by outside supervillains, who mind-control her into attacking the diplomats and trying to disrupt the peace process. After a lot of punching, one of the New Warriors—Justice, an American Jew whose eyes remind Sabra of her son—manages to snap her out of it by reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish, a prayer spoken in memory of the deceased. It’s a rather nice moment, which Sabra ruins by hitting on him as she’s being led away in handcuffs. “No one messes with my body… unless I invite them to,” she tosses over her shoulder to the man she previously compared to her dead child. “If you know what I mean. Remember, Israel is beautiful this time of year.”

Subsequent Marvel creators—perhaps suspecting that that particular well was better left alone, the cowards—eventually retconned Sabra as a mutant, tying her over into the X-Men side of the publishing line. Sabra’s appearance in the 1997 X-Line crossover Operation: Zero Tolerance is tolerable enough, an attempt to move the character away from the thorny waters of genuine conflict and into a more comfortable and vague metaphor about intolerance. Giving Sabra a bit of distance from her role as a nationalist hero could have opened up room for further development as a character in her own right. But that didn’t stick, either: Most of Sabra’s subsequent appearances—largely glorified cameos—have emphasized her role as a willing and unquestioning tool of the Israeli state, and generally willing to put its interests over anyone else’s.

All of this makes Sabra an often annoying character to read. But a bigger problem is what happens when you juxtapose her against the real nation she ostensibly represents, an act which raises painful and contentious issues which Marvel Comics is not in any way equipped to tackle.

The formation of Israel as a nation is not a simple story. For all that Zionism as a political movement was driven by utopian and often socialist ideals, Zionist Jews got their state from the British Empire: the same colonial power that—in a typically British blend of incompetence and malice—had spent 40 years of colonial rule in Palestine promising the moon to both Arab and Jewish factions. And, as with other colonial projects, the drawing of Israel onto the map entailed the expulsion of an estimated 700,000 Palestinians living on the land, the denial of their right to return, and the creation of a massive group of permanent refugees.

The expulsion of the Palestinians—combined with the attempt to fashion an explicitly Jewish social democracy—created a contradiction in the state that has festered ever since. Attempts to get around this problem through a “two-state” solution have failed. In 1995, a few months after New Warriors #59 had a mind-controlled Sabra disrupt a fictionalized Rabin’s peace summit, the real Rabin was assassinated by Israeli ultra-nationalist settler Yigal Amir for the crime of pursuing the Oslo Accords. The need to police a disenfranchised Arab population rather than integrating them has led to a seemingly eternal cycle of violence. Today, Israel's armed forces have shot journalists and bombed newsrooms, and raided Palestinian human rights groups and mosques. The United Nations has observed a pattern of expanding Israeli settlements on nominally Palestinian lands in the West Bank, where Palestinians are subject to a separate legal system from Israeli Jews. Gaza has been under Israeli blockade for 15 years, in part to stop Hamas, a militant organization; militant attacks are, in turn, used to justify further crackdown and war. It is an untenable and deeply ugly situation, one which shows no signs of abating, and one which outside observers increasingly describe as a form of apartheid.

Nationalist superheroes, as Zach Rabiroff writes at Polygon, are always tricky, in part because there are few modern nation states who do not have ugly histories: a character like Captain America represents a nation with more colonial blood on its hands than the nation of Israel. Yet many Captain America stories grapple with the ways that America fails to uphold its stated values. (As often as Steve Rogers has been an agent of the American state in his history, he seldom seems to stay that way for long.)

Sabra, as depicted in Marvel Comics, engages with no such tensions. She does not question her government—and, outside of her first appearance, she seldom questions anything. She is, at all times, a weapon of the state. She exists as she does because the Israel she represents—the tough little nation, beleaguered on all sides and beset by a seemingly intractable conflict—is a necessary fantasy of the West, constructed both in life and media as a place of perpetual conflict. That Israel draws its power from old and understandable grievances. But as Arielle Angel writes in Jewish Currents, grievance offers its own libidinal pleasures. Drawing our meaning from it risks blinding us both to the harm we deal out and the possibility of solidarity, and makes it impossible to move toward a better future.

This, in the end, is the tragedy of Sabra: She was made to represent an Israel that cannot ever change, so she, in turn, cannot change. She’s less a character than Israel Girl, a floating signifier of “geopolitical complexity,” and a toy Marvel uses to stand in for a vast conflict, the realities of which are too ugly to imagine genuinely engaging with.

It doesn’t have to be that way, of course. The old wounds of Jewish history are rich thematic ground for a superhero. The contradictions between the founding dream of Israel, its original sins as a state, and the current, brutal realities of its internal policies are worth engaging with. But those are pathways through thornier territory than Marvel—particularly the relatively anodyne, politically squeamish MCU—likely wishes to cross, despite promising “a new approach” to Sabra.

What they are left with instead is an intensely loaded character: a Jewish agent of Israel whom the studio is introducing in a film called, once again, Captain America: New World Order.

What could possibly go wrong?

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