Wonder Woman: Goddess of Fictional and Actual Wars

Wonder Woman (dir. Patty Jenkins, 2017), a US film based on a DC Comics superhero, was released to rave reviews in the United States even as it was mired in controversy related to its Israeli female lead, Gal Gadot. Heated debates transpired over whether Gadot was a feminist icon (Gibson 2017; Macnab 2017; Williams 2017), her pay compared to that of male counterparts (Whitten 2017), her status as a former Israeli soldier (Barrows-Friedman 2017; Dabashi 2017), and whether, as an Ashkenazi Jew, she is white or a person of color (Heckle 2017). In my Jordanian sociopolitical and cultural landscape, Gadot was widely seen as first and foremost an Israeli soldier and citizen who had served during the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and had used social media to express her support for the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza that killed hundreds of...