Adidas said on Friday it has removed outspoken pro-Palestinian model Bella Hadid from an advertising campaign for retro sneakers referencing the 1972 Munich Olympics, which was marred by a massacre of Israeli athletes.
The German sportswear giant recently relaunched the SL72, a shoe first featured by athletes at the 1972 Olympics, as part of a series of reviving old classic sneakers.
Eleven Israeli athletes and a German police officer were killed at the 1972 Munich Games when gunmen from the Palestinian Black September group stormed the Olympic Village and took hostages.
Bella Hadid, who was born in the US but has Palestinian roots on her father, has been vocal about her support for Palestinian rights since the war in Gaza began following a Hamas attack on Israel on October 7.
Adidas said it would “modify the remainder of the campaign” with immediate effect.
“We are aware that connections have been made to tragic historical events – albeit entirely unintentional – and we apologise for any upset or inconvenience caused,” the company said in a statement sent to AFP on Friday.
‘mass memory’
A spokesperson confirmed that Bella Hadid has been removed from the campaign, which noted that the shoes were first introduced in 1972 but nowhere mentioned the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes.
Pictures of the American model wearing retro Adidas shoes sparked outrage among pro-Israel groups.
“Guess who is the face of this campaign? Bella Hadid, a model of Palestinian origin who has in the past spread anti-Semitism and incited violence against Israelis and Jews,” the Israeli Embassy in Germany wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday.
Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, responded to the company’s retraction, saying, “How can Adidas now claim that the reference (to the Munich events) was made ‘completely inadvertently’?”
“The terror of 1972 is etched in the collective memory of Germans and Israelis,” he told Die Welt TV on Friday.
Meanwhile, many posts on social media expressed support for Bella Hadid, criticized Adidas for firing the model and called for a boycott of the company.
Pro-Palestine demonstration
The Gaza war began with an attack by Palestinian Hamas militants on southern Israel on October 7, resulting in the deaths of 1,195 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on Israeli data.
At least 38,848 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Israel’s military retaliation to crush Hamas, according to health ministry figures in Hamas-ruled Gaza.
Bella Hadid has attended several pro-Palestinian demonstrations during the conflict and has described the Israeli invasion as a “genocide”.
In 2021, Bella Hadid, her sister Gigi Hadid, and singer Dua Lipa were described as antisemitic in an advertisement published in The New York Times by a Jewish group called the World Values Network.
Adidas said it will continue the SL72 campaign with other celebrities, including footballer Jules Kounde, singer Melissa Bonn and model Sabrina Lann.
In late 2022, Adidas ended its contract with the American rapper, now formally known as Ye, after he sparked outrage with a series of anti-Semitic social media posts.
Germany’s response to the Hamas attacks and the subsequent war is driven by guilt over its own dark past and the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
The country has staunchly supported Israel in the conflict, but its inflexible stance has led to claims that Palestinian voices are being marginalised.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
