Adidas Single Shoe Program Faces Boycott Over Israeli Ad

Here is what Adidas actually did. In January, the company began selling single shoes in Europe, at half the price of a pair, to people who need only one. It built the service with disability organizations, including the British Paralympic Association. It has since expanded the program into Asia and the Middle East. When the service reached Israel, the local marketing team put eleven people in the campaign. One of them was a man named Shalev Biton, who has one leg.

For this, the internet has decided Adidas (and Shalev Biton) must be destroyed.

The mechanics of the pile-on are worth understanding, because they are the same mechanics that operate every time. Strip the context, isolate the Israeli, and present a global accessibility program as though it were commissioned by the IDF spokesman's unit. Millions of views later, the version circulating bears almost no relationship to what happened. Biton is described as the face of the campaign; he was one of eleven. The service is described as built for wounded Israeli soldiers; it was built in Europe, months earlier, with British Paralympians. Adidas has now had to issue a statement explaining that its shoes are for everyone. That such a statement was necessary is itself the story.

The objection, as its authors put it, is that Adidas chose to build an accessibility moment around an Israeli soldier rather than around anyone else who has lost a limb in this war. Take it seriously for a moment and watch what happens to it.

Start with the fact that the campaign is not a competition and the service is not a prize. Single Shoe is not a scholarship with limited seats. It is a change to how a retailer sells inventory, and it applies to anyone who walks into an Adidas store needing one shoe, in any market where it operates. Biton's participation in an advertisement does not remove one other person from eligibility, anywhere on earth. The critics have confused a marketing decision with a rationing decision.

Then notice that the remedy demanded does not match the grievance stated. If the complaint is that amputees deserve better, the logical demand is expansion: more markets, deeper subsidy, partnerships with prosthetics programs. Instead the demand is a boycott, which if it succeeded would pressure a company to retreat from a disability program rather than widen it. Consider what that would actually teach a corporation. Not that it should serve more amputees. That amputees are a marketing risk, and the safe play is to sell shoes in pairs and say nothing.

And then there is the part I cannot get past. Nobody has objected to what Biton said. He said that after he learned to run again he kept having to buy shoes he could not use, and that this had finally changed. There is no politics in that sentence. There is no argument in it about borders or occupation or war aims. It is a man describing the small daily indignity of paying twice for half of what he needs. The sentence is unobjectionable. The only thing that makes it unbearable to the people attacking him is who said it.

That is the actual principle being asserted here: that inclusion carries a nationality clause, and that accessibility is a benefit certain people forfeit by being born in the wrong country. Said plainly, it sounds like what it is. It is only tolerable when it stays unsaid, buried under a hashtag.

It also has a target, and the target is not a multinational. Adidas has a communications department and will survive. Biton spent Saturday night asking his followers to help keep his Instagram account alive after a coordinated flood of reports and abuse. A man who lost a leg to a Kornet missile near the Gaza border, whose fellow soldier Omer Tabib was killed in the same vehicle, is being mass-reported off a social platform for appearing in a shoe advertisement. Whatever this is, it is not solidarity with the disabled. It is the ordinary business of making an Israeli disappear, dressed for the occasion in the language of compassion.

Adidas has been here before from the opposite direction. Two years ago it pulled Bella Hadid from a campaign for a sneaker associated with the 1972 Munich Olympics, then apologized to her for how it handled the episode. The company's actual position appears to be that it would like to sell athletic footwear and be left alone. This is not a brand with an agenda. It is a brand discovering, twice now, that there is no neutral ground left to stand on.

There should be. A half-price single shoe for a person with one leg is about as close to a politically empty act of decency as commerce ever produces. If even that cannot survive the argument, the argument has stopped being about anything except who is permitted to be seen.

It's also worth mentioning that the thousands of new amputees in Gaza would not be amputees if Hamas hadn't carried out October 7th. And (unironically), they could benefit from Single Shoe, too, but what's most important is to bash Israel, at all costs.