Israel: The Jewish Wakanda?

Imagine if Wakanda were real.

Not because of vibranium, invisible force fields, or impossible technology. Those are the surface pleasures of the story. What made Wakanda resonate was the idea beneath it: a people who retained control over their own destiny.

Wakanda is not really a fantasy about superheroes.

It is a fantasy about sovereignty.

It imagines a civilization that never lost the ability to determine its own future. A people that never had to ask permission to exist. A nation free to build its own institutions, preserve its culture, defend its citizens, and shape its own future.

That is why the comparison with Israel resonates for many Jews.

Not because Israel is Wakanda.

It isn’t.

Israel has no protective shield, no isolation from history, and no escape from politics. It is a small, argumentative parliamentary democracy in one of the world’s most dangerous neighborhoods.

Israel is not a fantasy.

It is something more difficult.

It is real.

For nearly two thousand years, Jews lived under the authority of other people’s governments. Jewish communities often flourished. They built schools, synagogues, businesses, charities, universities, literature, music, and great centers of learning. But whether Jews would ultimately be protected, tolerated, expelled, or murdered was almost always a decision made by someone else.

Sometimes rulers protected Jews.

Sometimes they didn’t.

Sometimes entire communities disappeared almost overnight.

The ruler changed.

The law changed.

The majority changed.

Or the mob arrived.

That history does not make Jews unique victims, nor uniquely virtuous. It simply explains why many Jews understand Israel differently than much of the world does.

For many, Israel is not merely another country.

It is the restoration of political agency.

Every nation eventually takes sovereignty for granted.

Jews spent most of their history without it.

Long before Israel existed, Jews repeatedly demonstrated what they could build even without a state of their own. As Neal Gabler argues in An Empire of Their Own, Jewish immigrants and their children largely built modern Hollywood, shaping how America imagined itself. Jews made outsized contributions to science, medicine, music, literature, economics, philosophy, and countless other fields. Despite making up only a tiny fraction of the world’s population, Jews have received a disproportionately high share of Nobel Prizes.

The point is not that Jews are somehow better than other people.

It is that a civilization without sovereignty repeatedly created extraordinary things.

Israel asks a different question.

What happens when that same civilization governs itself?

The answer has been remarkable.

A country smaller than New Jersey, with just over ten million people, absorbed generations of immigrants from more than one hundred countries while reviving Hebrew from a language of prayer and scholarship into the language of schoolyards, courtrooms, comedy clubs, scientific journals, text messages, and children arguing with their parents.

It learned to grow food in arid conditions through pioneering advances in irrigation and agriculture. It became a global leader in desalination and water recycling despite having few natural freshwater resources. It built world class universities, hospitals, research institutions, and one of the world’s leading technology ecosystems.

It accomplished much of this while fighting repeated wars for its survival and living under persistent security threats that few modern democracies have experienced.

None of this makes Israel morally perfect.

It does not place Israeli governments beyond criticism.

It does not erase the suffering of others.

A country is not vindicated by innovation.

But these achievements help explain what Jewish sovereignty made possible.

The greatest achievement of Israel was not building an army.

It was rebuilding a civilization.

That is what many outsiders often miss.

Israel does not matter to Jews only because it offers protection, although protection matters.

It represents continuity.

It represents responsibility.

It represents the possibility that one of the world’s oldest surviving peoples will continue because Jews themselves are responsible for carrying the story forward.

The fantasy of Wakanda is not superiority.

It is self determination.

It imagines a people able to write their own story instead of appearing only as a supporting character in someone else’s.

Americans cheer for Wakanda because it imagines what a people can become when they control their own destiny.

For many Jews, that idea is no longer confined to fiction.

We call it Israel.

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Author’s Note

An interesting historical footnote is that Wakanda and Black Panther were co-created in 1966 by Stan Lee (Stanley Martin Lieber) and Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg), both Jewish Americans. Stan Lee’s father, Jack Lieber, has been described by Lee’s biographer as a committed Zionist who encouraged his son to use his prominence to support Israel. There is no evidence, however, that Wakanda was inspired by Israel or that its creators intended it as an allegory for the Jewish state. The comparison in this essay is not about authorial intent. It is about meaning. Cultural symbols often outgrow their creators and come to represent ideas far beyond what was originally intended. For many Jews, Wakanda’s central idea—a people exercising sovereignty over their own destiny—offers a useful metaphor for understanding what Israel represents: not perfection or immunity from criticism, but the restoration of Jewish self determination after centuries of political dependence.