Ever since Captain America famously leaped into action decking Hitler 85 years ago, Marvel Comics has been fascinated with the idea of superheroic nationalism. In Steve Rogers’ wake, flag-bedecked heroes representing a plethora of world powers, either as a response to the American creation of the supersoldier serum or the simple necessity of a superheroic figurehead in a world populated by them, have risen up. But few have been as complicated and fraught to deal with than Sabra, the national hero of Israel—a controversial character long before her MCU debut this week in Captain America: Brave New World expounded that controversy even further.
Introduced by Bill Mantlo and Sal Buscema 45 years ago in the pages of The Incredible Hulk #256, Sabra—real name Ruth Bat-Seraph, and named for a local fruit as well as a slang term for an Israeli native—has long had to grapple with representing multiple identities. In a comics industry built on the back of the work of Jewish creatives, Sabra remains one of a select group of Jewish Marvel characters, and key part of an even tinier group of characters to explicitly hail from Israel. Later retconned after her debut to be a mutant rather than the result of an Israeli answer to the supersoldier serum that created Captain America, she was given a minority identity that would frequently become more of a focus than the background of either her faith or ethnicity, or, more difficultly her historical relationship with her government.
It’s that latter aspect of Sabra’s character that has paradoxically made her an important representative figure—she was the first Israeli superheroine, and arguably still even to this day is the most famous Israeli superhero—and also one whose existence in the comics has been pushed further and further to the fringes since her debut. While many of Marvel’s national heroes have worked with their governments at times in their careers, Sabra was introduced as not just Israel’s national hero, but an agent of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. That gave her an explicit connection to the actions of the Israeli government that, if anything, Sabra (until she largely exited from significant comics appearances in the wake of Secret Invasion in 2008, which coincidentally wrapped up just prior to the outbreak of the first Gaza War) has been pushed further and further into embracing after she was first introduced.
It is arguably this gung-ho support of her national government, above even her home nation itself, that has set Sabra apart from her fellows in the nationally representative superhero space. For as many of these kinds of heroes in Marvel’s oeuvre as there are, there are arguably just as many of them that have frequently rebelled against an explicit tie to their nation’s governing bodies. Over the years the multiple Captains America have of course frequently been show to be at odds with the U.S. government, projecting themselves as beholden to the nation’s ideals, rather than its political leaders—an extrication that has occasionally not always been well communicated. Multiple incarnations of Captain Britain have likewise, through the lens of British creatives, been used to criticize and examine their relationship to the government—especially the latest bearer of the mantle, Betsy Braddock, navigating the thorny balancing act of being a dual-citizen representative of the United Kingdom, and, at the time, the mutant nation state of Krakoa (a storyline that Sabra has never really had to deal with herself, even beyond her general decline in appearances in contemporary comics).
But even when other national superheroes have been defined in contrast by their adherence to political and state ideology, that contrast has been colored by negative perception—the Red Guardian, Russia’s answer to Captain America and created amidst the geopolitical tensions of the Cold War, is perhaps the most clear representation of this. This has rarely been the case with Sabra across her appearances, even ones that have put her at odds with the plights of her retconned mutant heritage. More often than not, Sabra has been defined by connections to the apparatus of the state, whether being an unabashed supporter of the Superhuman Registration Act during Civil War (explicitly assigned by Mossad so the Israeli government could learn how to implement their own equivalent to the act), or in appearing as an official representative of the Israeli government.
Sabra’s enmeshing with the actions of the Israeli government, then, have made her a political landmine over the years, especially when it comes to the nation’s repeated conflicts with Palestine. Several of her early stories as an Incredible Hulk character served as commentaries on Israeli-Palestinian relations. Her debut issue, in which she battles Hulk to a standstill after he goes on a rampage, climaxes in a famous series of panels with Sabra, clad in her jingoistic outfit in the colors and symbology of the Israeli flag, mournfully kneeling over the body of a Palestinian child who had befriended the Hulk before being killed in a bombing, along with the commentary that “It has taken the Hulk to make her see this dead Arab boy as a human being, it has taken a monster to awaken her own sense of humanity.” But in the years since that issue, as Sabra was moved even more specifically in the direction of being a supportive agent of the Israeli state, her reconciling with her duty and her nation’s ongoing persecution of the Palestinian people all but vanished, even as international criticism of Israel’s government has grown.
It’s telling, perhaps then, that Sabra as arrives in the MCU at yet another tempestuous geopolitical moment—and the world’s ongoing reaction to Israel’s attempted genocide in Gaza—she does so in a radically changed form. Although the announcement of Sabra’s appearance in Captain America: Brave New World and its eventual release will have seemingly bookended the latest outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian war (Israeli actress Shira Haas was first announced as joining the film, then known as New World Orderat D23 2022, two years before the October 2024 terrorist attack that resulted in the Israeli invasion of Gaza; the film releases this week amid a tense ceasefire established between Hamas and the Israeli government), the character has undergone a swath of changes in production compared to her comics counterpart as part of attempts to mitigate the backlash to her inclusion.
Long gone is either her original Star of David costume or her later supersuits, as is her heroic codename, as well as both her mutant identity and her connection to the Israeli government as a Mossad operative. Now, Bat-Seraph, while still an Israeli national, is an agent of the U.S. government, and tied into the history of the MCU’s take on the Black Widow program, a former Russian intelligence initiative turned into an international assassin school. But fascinatingly compared to her comics counterpart one thing that will remain, albeit in a new perspective, is an allegiance to the government she serves—this time framed in contrast to the film’s protagonist.
“But Ruth’s point of view in the movie is really cool because it’s no secret she works for the U.S. government and she’s working with [U.S. President] Thaddeus Ross,” Brave New World producer Nate Moore recently told Entertainment Weekly about the film’s approach to Bat-Seraph. “I think what’s interesting in the dynamic is Ruth and Sam have a very different perspective on who Thaddeus Ross is and whether or not he is a worthy president. And I think that’s going to put Sam and Ruth on a bit of a collision course in an interesting way.”
Even among Marvel’s other national heroes, Sabra has long been a touchy character—one who has had to dance around representation of an underserved religious and ethnic background while also doing so with explicit ties to the political actions of a sovereign state that has grown increasingly divisive to international audiences. The comics have largely dealt with this tumultuous issue by pushing Sabra into the background, but as Brave New World puts her back into the spotlight, even in such an radically transformed manner, a reckoning with her past—and whatever could be made of her present and future—feels as inevitable as it does fraught.
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