It would be difficult to design a story more tailor-made for publicity even at a time when the United States is having its own Succession-like drama: A supermodel, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Olympics—as the Saturday Night Live character Stefan would say, this one’s got everything.
There’s so much to the Bella Hadid vs. Adidas story, in fact, that a deceptively minor-seeming detail goes overlooked. Yet that detail helps explain a lot about the current round of Israeli-Palestinian hostility.
First, the controversy. Adidas launched an advertising campaign for a shoe intended to be a throwback/homage to a sneaker used by athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics. Those games will forever be under a dark cloud because that’s when eleven Israeli athletes and one West German policeman were murdered by Palestinian terrorists. (This summer’s Olympics are in Paris, where a left-wing lawmaker told Israeli athletes they weren’t welcome. France announced yesterday it will provide extra security to the Israeli team.)
Atop this questionable decision, Adidas piled a whopper: Its chosen model for the ’72 throwback shoe would be none other than Bella Hadid, a viciously anti-Israel celebrity who has used her platform to advance pro-Hamas propaganda. Adidas then apologized and said it would be revising the campaign. Then Hadid reportedly lawyered up, and Adidas apologized to Hadid. The shoe company founded by actual Nazis is very sorry to everyone involved—sorry to Bella Hadid, sorry to her critics for hiring Bella Hadid, etc.
Bella’s sister Gigi is also an Israel-hating supermodel. Their father is Mohamed Hadid, a super-rich anti-Semite of epic proportions. In addition to his Jew-hatred, Hadid has been harassing pro-Israel Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres with increasingly psychotic racist and homophobic messages. “Make sure you dress as KKK to hide that ugly gray colored face of yours,” he wrote in one. In another, he suggested Torres “get a job as bouncer at gay bar.” Another published by the New York Post: “You are just unusual Black and colorful mouth for Israeli and AIPAC and looking for payday of over 500K.”
Mohamed Hadid tends to explain away his racism and anti-Semitism as the anger and passion of a Palestinian still seeking vengeance for Israel’s victory in 1948. But one aspect of Hadid’s back story is illuminating here. He was born in 1948 in Nazareth, which a few months earlier had gone from British to Israeli stewardship. In the Hadid family’s own telling, his father then took the family to Syria because he refused “to live under the Israeli occupation.”
As Hadid’s careful choice of words hints, Nazareth was not cleared of its Arab population by Israeli troops. Today it is a mostly Arab town of nearly 80,000. According to Hadid, his relatives remained there after the war. The “occupation” Hadid speaks of, then, is actually just Israeli sovereignty. This is helpful to know, because to Hadid all of Israel is illegitimate, as is Jewish self-determination. If the problem is Israel’s existence, what’s the solution?
In fact, the “Nazareth problem”—by which I mean the increasingly popular belief that Israel and Palestine both exist simultaneously, and one can go back and forth between these two planes of reality—has become a major obstacle preventing coexistence. The Nazareth problem is, in its own way, a solution. It just happens to be a solution that erases Jewish self-determination.
According to this mindset, the battle for Palestine rages until the Jews are defeated, and therefore Israel exists only as a figment of Jewish imagination. Thus we have the trend of media describing all Israeli Arabs as “Palestinians in Israel” or “Palestinian Israelis,” the latter a particularly nonsensical formulation for Arabs who have only ever lived in the state of Israel, to say nothing of Bedouin or Druze Arabs.
The more insidious version: ’48 Palestinians, or ’48 Arabs. You’ll find the term not just in Al Jazeera but in the Columbia Journalism Review and in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and Foreign Policy magazine. The logical next step—simply referring to Israel as ’48—follows closely behind. The point of such semantic acrobatics is to erase the term Israel from the lexicon.
And so it becomes utterly ridiculous to describe the Hadids and others like them as “critical of the Israeli government,” or some similar wording. This war is between Israel and Hamas, and Hamas isn’t fighting for the Galilee; it’s fighting for Tehran. The Arabs in Nazareth vote in Israeli elections. They are not under occupation, they are citizens of a state—no matter how much anti-Zionist influencers wish they weren’t.
