On Wednesday, Benjamin Netanyahu is having the red carpet rolled out for him in Washington DC. The Israeli prime minister, who is propped up by far-right extremists, will have the great honour of addressing Congress. The international criminal court may think he is a tad problematic, but in the twisted world we live in, he is being treated like a dignified statesman. The real villain du jour? A glance at the press suggests it’s the model Bella Hadid.
Hadid’s crime? She is part of a campaign for Adidas’s SL72 trainers. Or, rather, she was. Adidas dropped her from the campaign last week after the official @Israel X account objected to her involvement because the SL72s were released during the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, when 11 Israelis were taken hostage and killed by the Palestinian militant group Black September.
Hadid has previously been the subject of Israel’s ire for allegedly chanting: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” on a march in 2021. Some say that phrase is a call for Palestinians to live as free and equal citizens; others say it advocates for the elimination of Israel. (Netanyahu has used the phrase “from the river to the sea” to oppose the creation of a Palestinian state.) Adidas, I should note, didn’t drop the campaign – which features a number of other celebrities – but said it would “revise” it.
Was Hadid part of Black September? Er, no … she wasn’t born until almost a quarter of a century after the Munich Olympics. Has she celebrated the tragedy? Also no. But the fact that she is Palestinian and has spoken out about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is seen to be enough to warrant her sacking. Indeed, there seems to be no greater crime at the moment than standing up for Palestinian lives. You can certainly argue it’s valid to criticise Adidas (a company that is no stranger to controversy) for this campaign, but I do wonder why the company has removed Hadid, the only model of Palestinian heritage, from it.
But then it seems strange for Hadid to associate herself with a shoe commemorating such a horrible Olympics. Why on earth would she do that? Probably because – shock horror – there is more nuance to this situation than anti-Palestinian voices would have you believe.
It seems unlikely that Adidas approached Hadid and said: “Hey, girl, please be the face of a shoe associated with an event at which Israelis were killed.” In fact, a press release for the SL72 campaign in March didn’t mention the Olympics; it talked about the running boom of the 1970s. Also, much of the coverage of the SL72s earlier this year didn’t mention the Munich Olympics, either.
Hadid, meanwhile, is a shoe influencer who has helped popularise various retro Adidas styles, so it wasn’t considered remotely controversial when she started wearing the SL72s this year. Rather, it feels as though controversy has been manufactured to demonise Hadid and Palestinians in general. She is, quite rightly, reportedly speaking to lawyers about her options.
While Hadid is being unfairly targeted, she should probably have seen this coming. Some Israeli extremists want people to think of Palestinians as “human animals”; it makes us easier to exterminate. Beautiful, successful, outspoken half-Palestinians such as the Hadid sisters are a threat to this narrative – and so the Hadids have been subject to vile abuse over the years.
This February, for example, a song calling for the Israel Defense Forces to attack Hadid and the British-Albanian popstar Dua Lipa topped the charts in Israel. (Lipa has also spoken up about Gaza.) In 2021, the New York Times ran a full-page advert in the main section of the Saturday newspaper paid for by a pro‑Israel group, which condemned the Hadid sisters and Lipa with an image featuring a Hamas rocket attack.
Attacking Hadid feels like a great distraction from the (US taxpayer-funded) hell on Earth that is Gaza. It’s fascinating to see which media outlets have chosen to write about this fake shoe controversy, but have ignored recent stories such as a 24-year-old man with Down’s syndrome being attacked by an IDF dog in Gaza and left to die on his own. It’s amazing to see how much more outrage Hadid has generated compared with harrowing testimony from a Jewish-American doctor who came back from Gaza and said he saw Palestinian children who had been shot in the head by the IDF.
Ten months into this horror show, it’s clear that the most abject Palestinian suffering has been horribly normalised. Even a shoe advert gets people more worked up than dead kids in Gaza.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
