Bella Hadid responds with her ‘shock’ at Adidas campaign

Bella Hadid has said she was “shocked” and “upset” when she found out that the Adidas campaign she fronted for the SL72 trainers, based on the design the German brand used in that year’s Olympic games, drew a connection to the Munich massacre.

“In advance of the campaign’s release, I had no knowledge of the historical connection to the atrocious events in 1972. I am shocked, I am upset, and I am disappointed in the lack of sensitivity that went into this campaign. Had I been made aware, from the bottom of my heart, I would never have participated,” Hadid wrote on Instagram.

“I would never knowingly engage with any art or work that is linked to a horrific tragedy of any kind,” the 27-year-old model wrote.

“I will forever stand by my people of Palestine while continuing to advocate for a world free of antisemitism. Antisemitism has no place in the liberation of the Palestinian people,” Hadid concludes.

She noted that her team should have known, Adidas should have known, and she herself “should have done more research”.

A historical misstep

In 1972, 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.

After the campaign was criticised by Jewish groups, Adidas released a statement that it would “revise” it and drop Hadid as its ambassador. Of the groups that criticised the campaign, many specified that Hadid’s presence as half-Palestinian – her father was born in Nazareth – made the insult of the campaign even greater.

“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.

Hadid is a vocal campaigner for the Palestinians and has spoken out regularly against the violence committed by both Hamas in Israel and the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza.

Many pro-Palestinian campaigners argued that specifically removing a half-Palestinian woman from a campaign as a way of appeasing campaigners against antisemitism amounted to bigotry.

In a WNK podcast recording with British-American broadcaster Mehdi Hasan and Hadid’s sister Alana, Hasan said: “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.”