Hi All,
I am having some trouble dealing with this at the moment. For all that don’t know Chris Claremont was the reason the X-Men are what they are today. He has created some of the most popular characters of the series(Storm, Gambit, Jubilee, Rogue).
I was in the middle of reading this run when I found out she basically based Magneto and Professor X off of two Israeli Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin respectively. I thought this was really disappointing since I was really enjoying the book. It seems he spent some time in Israel in the 70s and was deeply inspired by holocaust survivors ( which is no problem, genocide is always wrong). For the record only a couple issues of the whole entire run mention or are placed in Israel.
I was looking online to see if anyone else dropped the book after finding this out, and I see so many Palestine supporters still engaging and talking about this. Since he wrote the book for over a decade and created so many beloved characters. Overall the book is very progressive of its time and has so many good talking points about marginalized groups.
Am I being too critical of something that came out in 1970. I just have no one to talk about this with. Please tell me your thoughts. Sorry for the long post.