The MCU has its work cut out for it with Sabra, Marvel’s Israeli Captain America
Marvel fans following this past weekend’s D23 Expo may have been surprised by the news that Israeli actress Shira Haas has been cast as the character Sabra in the upcoming film Captain America: New World Order. The surprise, however, wasn’t in the casting, but in the immediate hubbub that erupted online about a character to whom the reaction might have been simply, “Sabra who?” But in some ways, the outcry was inevitable.
As an Israeli, a mutant, and an agent of the Mossad, Sabra sits at the intersection of more than a few highly fraught political fault lines. And in the world of Marvel Comics, she isn’t alone.
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. 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. 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”). 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.
Even 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
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