After campaigners convinced Adidas to drop its Olympics campaign featuring the pro-Palestinian model, the German shoe brand has now issued an apology to Bella Hadid.
ADVERTISEMENTAdidas has apologised to model Bella Hadid after the company pulled an advertising campaign to relaunch their SL72 Olympic shoe.
Last week, Adidas confirmed that it was “revising” its campaign to relaunch a shoe design used in the 1972 Olympics after it drew criticism for its connection to the Munich massacre.
During the Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, eight Palestinian militants entered the Olympic village and killed two Israeli athletes before taking nine more hostage who were later also killed.
Ever since, the 1972 Games has been indelibly linked to these tragic events and was dramatised by Steven Spielberg in his 2005 film Munich.
When Adidas pulled the campaign to promote the SL72 shoes, which it had called a “timeless classic”, it was in the face of large-scale criticism for the campaign featuring Hadid. The American model’s father is Palestinian and she has been continually outspoken against Israel’s war on Hamas since 7 October.
Following the attack on Israel when Hamas militants killed 1,175 Israelis and took around 250 people hostage and Israel’s resultant bombardment of Gaza, Hadid shared her condemnation of both Hamas’s attack and Israel’s violent response on Instagram.
“Seeing the aftermath from the airstrikes in Gaza, I mourn with all the mothers who have lost children and the children who cry alone, all the lost fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunties, friends that will never again walk this earth,” Hadid wrote on 26 October, before adding: “I mourn for the Israeli families that have been dealing with the pain and aftermath of October 7th. Regardless of the history of the land, I condemn the terrorist attacks on any civilians, anywhere.”
Due to Hadid’s condemnation of Israel’s attack on Gaza – in which around at least 40,000 Palestinians have been killed – supporters of Israel have criticised the inclusion of the model in Adidas’ campaign.
The official account for Israel’s embassy in Germany posted its anger at the situation on X: “Guess who the face of the campaign is? Bella Hadid, a model of Palestinian descent who has a history of spreading anti-Semitism and calling for violence against Israelis and Jews.”
“To have her launch a shoe commemorating an Olympics when so much Jewish blood was shed is just sick,” the chief executive of the Combat Anti-Semitism Movement added.
Adidas issued an apology for the campaign.
“We are conscious that connections have been made to tragic historical events — though these are completely unintentional — and we apologise for any upset or distress caused,” it said. “As a result, we are revising the remainder of the campaign.”
It’s been reported that Hadid was considering legal action against Adidas for pulling the campaign. In response, Adidas has issued an update, including an apology to her.
“We also apologise to our partners, Bella Hadid, ASAP Nast, Jules Koundé, and others, for any negative impact on them and we are revising the campaign,” the apology now also reads.
The situation was brought up during a WNK podcast recording with Hadid’s sister Alana and British-American broadcaster Mehdi Hasan. While Alana chose not to speak on the topic, Hasan interjected that he thought the decision by Adidas to remove Hadid from the campaign was “anti-Palestinian bigotry”.
ADVERTISEMENT“The idea that you can say to a Palestinian model, who wasn’t born in 1972 that you cannot advertise a sneaker associated with the 1972 Olympics because Palestinians carried out acts of terror at that Olympics. The only thing you can say they have in common is that they’re Palestinian, which is the definition of bigotry, it’s the definition of racism,” Hasan said.
