LSuperheroes are not necessarily popular in the Arab world. Wonder Woman, one of the iconic characters of DC Comics, experienced this when the film bearing her name, in 2017, was banned in Lebanon, Qatar and Tunisia. In question, the Israeli actress Gal Gadot, who played the title role, after playing a former Mossad agent in the franchise Fast and Furious. Arab censors then criticized Gadot for his support for the 2014 Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip, as well as his participation in the 2006 war in Lebanon.
The release in 2020 of the second part of the series, Wonder Woman 1984took place in a calmer climate, against a backdrop of“Abraham Accords” and Arab normalization with Israel. Even the caricatural representation of Egypt as an oil emirate aroused finally little controversy. But it is the turn of the Marvel universe, owned by the Walt Disney Company, to now be at the center of a heated controversy.
A Mossad superheroine
Marvel Studios have just revealed that their next blockbuster, Captain America 4: New World Order, which is scheduled for release in 2024, will include a new superheroine, Sabra, an Israeli national. This character had appeared in 1980 in one of the adventures on paper of Hulk, whose blind rage this time threatened to destroy Tel Aviv.
A Mossad agent, Ruth Bath Seraph, raised in a kibbutz, then transformed into Sabra, Star of David in necklace and tights in the blue and white colors of the Israeli flag. Hulked by Sabra, Hulk encountered a “young Arab” who told him: “It’s hard to be an Arab in Israel, my people, as well as the Israelis, both claim that this land belongs to them. They could have shared if two very old books hadn’t suggested that they kill each other instead. » Sabra ended up feeling compassion for this “young Arab”, killed in a Palestinian attack.
A campaign is launched on social networks against “Captain Apartheid”
Marvel has already assigned the role of Sabra to Israeli actress Shira Haas, noticed on Netflix in the series Unorthodox. It didn’t take much for a campaign to be launched on social networks against “Captain Apartheid”with open letter to Marvel Studios and Disney, accused of “Legitimize the crimes of the Israeli government”. They are also accused of having called their superheroine Sabra, in full commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the massacre perpetrated in Beirut in September 1982, in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Chatila. This trial of intention seems particularly debatable since “Sabra” was, before 1948, the Hebrew term to designate the Jews born in the land of Palestine, and therefore by extension the Israelis born there since (this word derives from the Hebrew name for the prickly pearspicy on the outside and sweet on the inside).
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