Released in 2014, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, is the film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that most directly addresses political issues, but those that it does are surprisingly relevant almost a decade after the film’s release. The central premise of the film is the creation of a set of “helicarriers” – floating fortresses that can target any threat anywhere in the world and rain death and destruction upon the world on behalf of the leaders of ‘the international community’.
Long before the Captain America character learns that the programme has been infiltrated and taken over by an evil organisation (Hydra), he opposes this project, asking what happened to innocent until proven guilty, stating bluntly, “You hold a gun on everyone on Earth and call it protection. This isn’t freedom. This is fear.”
In a later scene, interrogating one of the Hydra members that will use the hellicarriers for their own purposes, Captain America and his friends learn that the vehicles will be implanted with an algorithm that will erase potentially problematic people “a million at a time”. The algorithm will process enormous data from social media feeds and public information to determine who these problematic people were.
They say that life sometimes imitates art, although rarely as neatly. Over the last two months as Israel has rained death and destruction on Gaza, one of the key enablers of the destruction is “the widespread use of a system called ‘Habsora’ (‘The Gospel’), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can ‘generate’ targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible.” The investigation by the publications +972 and Local Call, relying on a series of interviews with Israeli intelligence and military people, highlights that “the use of a system like Habsora makes it possible to locate and attack the homes of relatively junior operatives.”
Hellicarriers in the film. Photo: Screengrab from video
Bear in mind what this means. These are not the planners of the attacks, and since the system relies on association, there is no need for evidence that any of these “junior operatives” took part in the horrific attacks on civilians on October 7, or any violent action ever. Instead, such murders are based on guilt by association, and because they are attacks on homes, also on the families of these people as well as anybody living in the same building. Worse, of course, are the attacks on what the Israeli military classifies as “power targets”, which are mainly civilian infrastructure – high-rise buildings, banks, even post offices – so civilians put pressure on Hamas. In legal terms, this is what is known as collective punishment and the deliberate targeting of non-combatants, or war crimes.
It will not be difficult for pro-Palestinian groups to draw a straight line with the helicarriers of The Winter Soldier and Israel’s governing the Gaza Strip as an ‘open-air prison’. And it will be even easier to compare the Hydra algorithm and Habsora, with the added horror of the many, many civilian casualties of the attacks on “power targets”. But where is Captain America in all of this?
It certainly isn’t US President Joe Biden. With his age and insistence on backing Israel’s military solution, he would, instead, look very much like the character played by Robert Redford, the key villain in The Winter Soldier, who thinks diplomacy is a “band-aid”.
These associations are important primarily because of how large a role comic book characters have in shaping American public opinion. With its multiple immigrant communities and hugely diminished native population, the US has few connecting mythologies on which to draw moral lessons. Comic book characters have filled that gap. ‘Captain America’ created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby – both immigrants of Jewish descent – stands out as one of the few explicitly political characters, and he was created not just to oppose Hitler, but also to advocate against the then policy of the United States which was to not get involved in World War II.
Also read: The US Is Part of the Problem in Israel-Palestine
Despite literally being dressed in the American flag, and a staple for WWII propaganda, Captain America has often been at odds with the US establishment. Nowhere was this made clearer than in the 1974 series where the villain is strongly implied to be US President Richard Nixon. In a recent run, Captain America fights off White racists on the US-Mexico border to help undocumented migrants. And the best parts of the 2021 TV series, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, in which a Black man picks up Captain America’s mantle (and shield), looked at America’s long history of racism. It is worth noting that the leaders of Black Lives Matter protests have explicitly aligned with Palestinians.
Captain America, as a character, has been a way of defining for many young and not-so-young – the average age of comic book readers is 35 – American readers what America should be, not what it is. The scenes being broadcast from the war in Israel and Palestine will be interpreted through such lenses. While the evidence of Hamas’s brutality against civilians during October 7 will resonate, so too will the images of Palestinian civilians digging out the body parts of their loved ones from the ruins of their homes. It is thus understandable that, in a recent US poll, “respondents under 35 years old… overwhelmingly said they disapprove of Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack (66%), have greater sympathy for Palestinians in the conflict than Israelis (52%) and believe the US is too supportive of Israel (50%).”
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has long prided himself on being able to manage the US establishment. In 2021 he even boasted, “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.” He may be correct insofar as the political establishment in the US is concerned, but does he know Captain America? That might, in the end, be far more important.
P.S. The upcoming Captain America film is supposed to depict the first Israeli superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Omair Ahmad is an author and journalist.
Israel-Palestine War: Benjamin Netanyahu’s Captain America problem
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04.12.2023
Released in 2014, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, is the film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that most directly addresses political issues, but those that it does are surprisingly relevant almost a decade after the film’s release. The central premise of the film is the creation of a set of “helicarriers” – floating fortresses that can target any threat anywhere in the world and rain death and destruction upon the world on behalf of the leaders of ‘the international community’.
Long before the Captain America character learns that the programme has been infiltrated and taken over by an evil organisation (Hydra), he opposes this project, asking what happened to innocent until proven guilty, stating bluntly, “You hold a gun on everyone on Earth and call it protection. This isn’t freedom. This is fear.”
In a later scene, interrogating one of the Hydra members that will use the hellicarriers for their own purposes, Captain America and his friends learn that the vehicles will be implanted with an algorithm that will erase potentially problematic people “a million at a time”. The algorithm will process enormous data from social media feeds and public information to determine who these problematic people were.
They say that life sometimes imitates art, although rarely as neatly. Over the last two months as Israel has rained death and destruction on Gaza, one of the key enablers of the destruction is “the widespread use of a system called ‘Habsora’ (‘The Gospel’), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can ‘generate’ targets almost automatically at a........
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