More than 20 Palestinian cultural, including theaters and performing arts centers, called on Saturday, 29 April 2023 to boycott Captain America: New World Order, unless Marvel drops its superhero Sabra AKA Ruth Bat-Seraph, who personifies the Israeli apartheid from the 2024 film.
In a joint letter, the organizations, including the Palestine Film Institute, the Freedom Theatre, and Popular Arts Center, condemned Marvel and parent company Disney over their complicity in whitewashing the Israeli crimes against Palestinian people.
The Israeli superhero first debuted on the pages of Marvel Comics in 1980 in the Incredible Hulk and is called Sabra.
Sabra, who uses mutant powers to aid so-called Israel was the first superhero in the Marvel canon to work with the security agency Mossad, which has killed, imprisoned, and ruined the lives of too many Palestinians to count.
Sabra is the informal name for Jews born in Israel. Social media users remarked how the word “Sabra” was insensitive due to the massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila in 1982, where thousands of civilians predominantly Palestinian were slaughtered by militias under the supervision of the Israeli forces who surrounded the areas and provided the Phalangists with bulldozers to bury the corpses of massacred Palestinians.
Pointing to the character’s backstory in Marvel comics that includes working for apartheid Israel’s government and Israeli occupation forces, the signatories say that “by reviving this racist character in any form, Marvel is promoting Israel’s brutal oppression of Palestinians.”
“We echo the call of Palestinian film and arts organizations for boycotting Captain America: New World Order. Whatever superficial changes Marvel may make, the character’s anti-Palestinian racist history and representation of apartheid Israel cannot be sanitized, said Alia Malak of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).
Israel’s government is the most far-right, racist, homophobic, sexist and fundamentalist in its history, with a senior minister describing himself as a ‘fascist homophobe.’ Marvel’s Israeli character is inherently associated with this apartheid government, including its influential fascist element.”
Shortlink for this post: https://daysofpalestine.ps/?p=39883
