![]() ![]() Truth be told, however, this sort of flattened hyper-patriotism has a long history within the Marvel Universe, and Sabra is far from the only superheroic national figurehead to problematically embody the traits of her home country. Marvel Comics and international nationalism Image: Paul Neary/Marvel Comics Later retconned to be a mutant, rather than a human creation of Super Soldier science, she has been at odds with her fictional minority identity as often as she’s sided with her real-life national one: helping to monitor and arrest mutants in the wake of Marvel’s House of M crossover, for instance, and at one point working to hunt down the terrorist Magneto - himself a character with backstory rooted in both Judaism and Israel, albeit one that’s more complex and less one-dimensional than Sabra’s own. ![]() That tendency to fall ever deeper into lockstep with the party line has come to define Sabra’s character over the years. I’m fighting the Zionist recruiting board,” thinks the Hulk. In a later Hulk story by longtime scribe Peter David, Sabra drags the title character into a long, unwinnable, and ultimately self-destructive battle that serves pointedly (if perhaps a little on-the-nose) as a metaphor for the entirety of Israeli and Palestinian history: “I’m not fighting a woman. Not that the lesson stuck: Indeed, later writers have, if anything, leaned even harder into ethnic and jingoistic elements of Sabra’s character. In the battle that follows, a young Palestinian boy is fatally caught in the crossfire - leading Sabra to reconsider, for the first time, the bullish, ethnic militarism around which she has built her superhero career. ![]() That comes through loud and clear in her first appearance, during which she attacks the Hulk, presuming him, somewhat improbably, to be in league with a group of Arab terrorists. Even her codename means, literally, “a person born in Israel.” Marvel Comics may have been many things in the 1980s, but politically subtle was not among them.Įven more obviously, and perhaps more troublingly, Sabra is a proud and unapologetic agent of Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad - a role which casts her not only as a superhero for a sovereign state, but one who makes no bones about her support for political policies that are, at minimum, deeply and painfully divisive. counterpart) was a visible and far-from-subtle collection of patriotic Israeli symbolism, from her white-and-blue costume bedecked with a Star of David to her powers (based on an Israeli fruit, as a footnote in her first appearance helpfully informs us, which projects “a spiny outer surface to protect it from its enemies”). Initially said to be a product of the Israeli military’s attempt to replicate the Super Soldier formula that had transformed Steve Rogers, Sabra (like her U.S. The creation of writer Bill Mantlo and artist Sal Buscema, Sabra (real name: Ruth Bat-Seraph) first appeared in 1980’s The Incredible Hulk #256 as a deliberate and self-conscious Israeli echo of Captain America. Image: Bill Mantlo, Sal Buscema/Marvel Comics ![]()
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