My rewrite for Sabra and Navid, because they both have a lot of potential to be really interesting characters.
Sabra / Ruth-Bat Seraph
So, to start off, Sabra’s calmed the fuck down. She supports a two-state solution and barely tolerates the right-wing assholes running her country. She’s about two minutes away from punching Bibi.
(Sometimes it seems Sabra’s supposed be to a criticism of Israeli policy, but the people writing her don’t have any clue what they’re doing, so it’s just misogynistic antisemitism. Delightful).
Now, her son Jacob, is still dead. I plan on focusing more on her grief and less on “Arab terrorists killed her son so now she’s racist”*. The reason I’m keeping this is because when the concept was first introduced in New Warriors, it helped make Ruth more a fleshed out character. Additionally, from the Sabra comics I’ve read, there’s a correlation between her and children/motherhood:
- Of course, there’s Sahad in her introductory comic, who she mourns.
- She and the Hulk have to team up to stop some guy named Achilles from assassinating a young boy who’s potentially Hitler 2.0. She knows this about the boy but is still concerned when he seemingly gets killed.
- She also saves a deaf American child from Israeli anarchists who kidnapped him, (that sounds like a 4Chan conspiracy), using her life force transferral to do so. It’s a rare of example of getting to see Sabra’s more compassionate side.
- And obviously there’s her dead son.
*While my version of Sabra does have racial biases, it’s more to do with her military experiences and she’s working to overcome them.
Side Note: I’m not sure if it’s ever stated, but I portray Ruth as Sephardic. There’s probably some implications with her dead son being portrayed as dark-skinned while Sabra’s had some of her Jewish features erased (less curly hair, blue/green eyes instead of brown).
Navid Hashim
Navid is reimagined as a Palestinian peace activist, no affiliation with the Saudi Arabian government. I *think* the writer was trying to make the Arabian Knight title not orientalist. I mean, it didn’t work, especially when Navid is portrayed as misogynistic for no reason except that he’s an Arab Muslim man. Unlike Sabra, who is a national superhero, Navid is considered a threat by Hamas due to his activism and connection to Sabra.
His parents were also peace activists that were executed by Hamas when he was fifteen. Navid was then sent to live with his maternal aunt and uncle, who are very pro-Hamas. Yeah, he’s had a less than ideal childhood. Generational trauma is something that he and Ruth have in common.
While Navid and Ruth share the same goal of a peaceful future and willing to work together to achieve it, they both have internalised biases. For Ruth, Navid contradicts her perception of Palestinians as either traumatised war victims or terrorists hellbent on the destruction of Israel. Navid has spent much of his life hearing that Israelis are violent oppressors who must be eliminated if Palestinians are to ever gain independence.