US model Bella Hadid has said she was “shocked, upset and disgusted” by an Adidas campaign featuring her, which revived memories of the 1972 terror attack that killed Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Bella Hadid, who is half Palestinian, appeared this month in an ad for Adidas’ SL 72 shoes. The shoes were first released for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany. During those Games, members of the Palestinian group Black September infiltrated the Olympic Village and killed 11 Israeli athletes. Adidas only withdrew the ads this month after receiving backlash.
Now, in a statement on Instagram, Hadid wrote, “I am shocked, upset, and disappointed by the lack of sensitivity in this campaign.” She said she never knew of the “historical connection to the brutal events of 1972.” She added, “I will never knowingly associate myself with any art or work that is connected to any horrific tragedy in any way.”
“My team should have known. Adidas should have known, and I should have done more research so I could have known, understood and spoken out,” Hadid, the child of a Palestinian father, said in 1996.
Hadid’s statement comes after Adidas withdrew ads featuring the model and pledged to revise the remainder of the SL 72 marketing campaign. The company said it did not intend to make any connection to “tragic historical events.”
The German company publicly apologized to Bella Hadid and others who participated in the campaign, saying the company had “unintentionally made a mistake” and regretted “any negative impact”.
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A spokesperson also 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.
Meanwhile, Bella Hadid, who was born in the US but has Palestinian roots through her father, has been vocal about her support for Palestinian rights since Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, which triggered the war in Gaza. She has taken part in numerous pro-Palestinian demonstrations during the conflict and has described Israel’s attack 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.
