Adidas has issued an apology following widespread calls to boycott the brand after a campaign featuring former Israeli soldier Shalev Biton, who lost his left leg while serving in the Israeli military in 2021, was used to promote its Single Shoe Service in stores in Israel.
The Single Shoe Service, which Adidas launched in Europe in January 2026 and formally announced in March, is a genuine accessibility initiative. It allows customers who need only one shoe, including people living with limb differences or amputations, to purchase a single shoe at half the price of a full pair rather than having to buy both shoes regardless of need. Biton was one of 11 disabled athletes featured on promotional posters displayed at Adidas stores in Israel.
On September 7, Adidas issued a statement apologising for the campaign: "We recognise that an image used in a recent local activation by the local team has raised concerns and strong reactions. It was never our intent to cause offense and we apologise for anyone affected." The company described the Biton activation as a local initiative rather than part of the broader global campaign.
What Triggered the Backlash
Biton announced his role in the campaign on Instagram in late August, describing it as the fulfilment of a personal dream and explaining that the idea grew out of his own frustration with having to buy a full pair of shoes despite needing only one. The video, produced in Hebrew, made no mention of his military service or how he lost his leg.
The backlash spread rapidly after Spanish actor Javier Bardem, who has 3.7 million Instagram followers, amplified the story. American influencer Guy Christensen, with approximately 3.7 million TikTok followers, described the campaign as "disgusting" and shared the hashtag BoycottAdidas. Writers, journalists, and activists with large social media followings joined the calls.
Critics argued that choosing an Israeli military veteran to front an amputee accessibility campaign was insensitive given the scale of amputations suffered by Palestinians in Gaza.
According to World Health Organisation estimates released in May 2026, more than 5,000 traumatic limb amputations and more than 22,000 major extremity injuries had occurred in Gaza. The hashtag BoycottAdidas spread across multiple platforms, with posts drawing hundreds of thousands of views and, in some cases, millions.
Some of the claims circulating on social media were factually incorrect. Biton was injured in 2021 during Operation Guardian of the Walls, not during the current Gaza war which began in October 2023.
Adidas also pushed back against suggestions that the Single Shoe Service was created specifically for Israeli soldiers, noting that it was developed in cooperation with communities and professional organisations including the British Paralympic Association, and is available across 23 European countries.
The Brand Risk Behind the Controversy
Adidas has now faced two significant geopolitical controversies connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within two years. In July 2024, the brand removed model Bella Hadid from a campaign referencing the 1972 Munich Olympics after Israeli advocacy groups objected to her public support for Palestinian causes. In that case, the backlash came primarily from Israeli and Jewish community organisations. In this case, it has come from pro-Palestinian voices.
The two controversies sit on opposite sides of the same politically charged environment and illustrate a problem that global brands with significant marketing activity in contested geopolitical contexts will increasingly face: it is very difficult to make casting decisions that avoid criticism when the subject of conflict itself carries strong and opposing views across different parts of your consumer base.
What Adidas did in Israel, featuring a local amputee athlete to promote a local version of a global accessibility initiative, is a standard localisation practice. A German brand operating in Israel would naturally feature Israeli athletes in its local marketing. The problem was the gap between the local context in which the campaign was created and the global context in which it was received.
An activation designed for Israeli store posters travelled far beyond those stores when Biton shared it on Instagram, and once it reached an international audience already sensitised to the Gaza conflict, the framing became impossible to separate from the political moment.
What Marketers Should Take From This
The Adidas situation is a case study in how a well-intentioned campaign can produce a reputational crisis when the gap between the context it was designed for and the context it ends up in is not accounted for in advance.
The Single Shoe Service is a genuine and positive accessibility initiative. Shalev Biton's story, an athlete who rebuilt his life after losing a limb and is now running competitively, is exactly the kind of ambassador story that an accessibility campaign is built to tell.
None of that is wrong. What created the problem was the specific combination of his identity as a former Israeli soldier, the ongoing conflict in Gaza, the volume of Palestinian amputees referenced in World Health Organisation data, and the global social media environment in which that combination became explosive.
For any brand operating globally with local activation strategies, the lesson is straightforward: local campaigns travel. What plays well in one market can land very differently in another, and in a social media environment where a single Instagram post can reach millions of people in markets the campaign was never designed for, the local and global risk assessment need to happen together rather than separately.
