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She looks like the Israeli flag on disco night.
Blue cape, white bodysuit.
Airborne in a costume spangled with six-pointed stars, she fires poisonous energy quills.
(An editors note explains that Sabra, a local prickly pear, is slang for native-born Israeli.)
She accuses Hulk of an alliance with masked Muslim terrorists who blow up a cafe.
The superhumans argue over the body of Sahad, a friendly young pickpocket killed in the explosion.
Boy died because boys people and yours both want to own land!
Boy died because you wouldnt share!
Sabra, chastened, kneels by the small corpse.
It has taken a monster to awaken her own sense of humanity.
Forty-five years later, Sabra makes her film debut inCaptain America: Brave New World.
She has no powers and no costume, unless you count some blue flair on her jacket.
She works for America.
Nobody calls her Sabra.Unorthodoxstar Shira Haas plays the reimagined Ruth as a security adviser to President Thaddeus Ross.
She was born in Israel, were told, then trained as a Black Widow.
After a couple fight scenes, she spends the climactic set pieces stranded on comm-links.
Shes nominally talking about her boss, but that line sounds like a plea.
The movie settles for worst-case-scenario defensiveness, refusing to define her at all.
Why adapt a character destined for controversy if youre going to remove all her character traits?
I suspect nobody at Marvel thought Sabra was controversial when Haass casting was announced in 2022.
Devastation has followed devastation ever since.
No one could mistake her character for propaganda.
No one will even remember her.
I feel semi-confident declaring Sabra was nobodys favorite comics character.
She only ever appeared occasionally as an anti-hero or Israels representative to the latest global-superhuman crossover.
Any zealots seeking patriotic appeal would need to grapple with her default arc: a walking moral quagmire.
Her firstHulkmisadventure, written by Bill Mantlo and drawn by Sal Buscema, established her as an overreactive hard-liner.
Note the differing levels of cultural curiosity.
Sabra has the Israeli national colors and her local moniker.
(Her name and concept were conceived by Belinda Glass, wife of Marvel editor Mark Gruenwald.)
Sabra again mistakes the monster for a foe.
Terrific, Hulk says, Im not fighting a woman.
Im fighting the Zionist recruiting board.
The young boy of prophecy gets trampled into a brain-dead coma.
David mixes Sabras self-righteousness with something edgier.
Violence against women here, she says, its becoming commonplace.
Frustrated soldiers are beating their wives because they had to stay their hand against Iraq.
Our anger eats away even at ourselves.
The girl in that story is Izzy Rabins daughter, presumably a reference to Yitzhak Rabin.
By now, she has a blunt murdered-son backstory: The Arabs killed him on his school bus.
Local superhero Firestar theorizes Sabra could be one of those radical Israelis whos actually opposed to the peace talks.
When Sabra learns an insta-lesson five minutes with the Hulk awakens her humanity!
you sense the perspective of milquetoast American liberalism, a bit of why-cant-we-get-along kumbaya.
However sincere the writers humanist intentions, Sabra always gets more narrative prominence than the Muslim characters.
The characters history is silly, tone-deaf, and rife with stereotypes.
Brave New Worldmakes her something worse: Boring.
On the page, Sabra was motivated by national pride.
Onscreen, she has no motivation, quickly becoming an inessential secondary sidekick.
(Theres a reason Bilge Ebiri doesnt mention her at all inhis lacerating review.)
Making her a helpful ex-Widow is the ultimate cop-out, replacing complex real-world connections with generic globo-spy fantasy.
Do you prefer controversial incoherence or bland repetition, disagreeable politics or the sixth Black Widow clone?
And in the comics, she never seems to stop anyone.
Is whole world crazy?
a big green man says in the wreckage of Tel Aviv.
Is there nowhere Hulk can go to find peace?!
Yes, it is; no, there isnt.
