US model Bella Hadid has said that she is "shocked, upset, and disappointed" at the Adidas campaign in which she was featured that evoked the memories of a 1972 terrorist attack that killed Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Bella Hadid, who is half-Palestinian, was featured this month in the Adidas advertisement for its 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 pulled the ads this month after receiving only backlash.
Now, in an Instagram statement, Hadid wrote, "I am shocked, I am upset, and I am disappointed in the lack of sensitivity that went into this campaign." She said that she never learned about the "historical connection to the atrocious events in 1972". "I would never knowingly engage with any art or work that is linked to a horrific tragedy of any kind," she said.
"My team should have known. Adidas should have known, and I should have done more research so that I too would have known and understood, and spoken up," Hadid, who was born in 1996 to a Palestinian father, added.
Hadid's statement comes after Adidas pulled the advertisement with the model and pledged to revise the remainder of the SL 72 marketing campaign. The company said that it did not intend to make any connections "to tragic historical events".
The German company also publicly apologised to Bella Hadid and others who participated in the campaign, saying the company "made an unintentional mistake" and expressing regret "for any negative impact".
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A spokeswoman also confirmed that Bella Hadid had been removed from the campaign, which notes that the shoes were first introduced in 1972 but never mentions the terror attack on the 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 the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 triggered the war in Gaza. She has taken part in several pro-Palestinian demonstrations during the conflict and has described Israel's offensive as a "genocide".
In 2021, Bella Hadid, her sister Gigi Hadid and singer Dua Lipa were described as anti-Semitic in an advertisement published in The New York Times by a Jewish group called the World Values Network.
