For All Amputees: How an Adidas Campaign Erased Gaza to Sell a Shoe

On August 26, 2026, Adidas Israel launched its "Single Shoe Service" — a program allowing customers who need only one shoe to buy it at 50% of the price of a pair — fronted by Shalev Biton, an Israeli military veteran and amputee. The campaign ran as an Instagram Reel and in-store video across Adidas locations in Israel.

The ad's own words, transcribed in full:

The in-store poster accompanying the campaign reads: "Out of a commitment to accessibility and equality, we're enabling the purchase of a single shoe as needed." The ad closes on Biton, running at night, delivering the campaign's central line:

At no point in the 46-second campaign is Gaza, the war, the IDF, or Biton's military service named. The military identity of the spokesperson is never stated in the ad itself — it is known only because Biton is a public figure whose story has been separately reported.

Biton was seriously wounded in May 2021, when an anti-tank missile struck his military vehicle near Gaza during that year's conflict — the same attack killed fellow soldier Omer Tabib. Biton's left leg was later amputated.

This detail matters for the article's accuracy and for its argument: Biton's injury is not from the current war. It predates October 7, 2023, by more than two years. Adidas Israel reached back roughly five years to a resolved, individual story of military injury and recovery — while the war that has produced Gaza's current amputee crisis was actively ongoing at the time of the campaign's release.

The campaign's closing line makes an explicit, universal claim: "for all amputees, the excuses have run out." Not "for our customers." Not "for people in Israel." All amputees.

This is the passage that defines the propaganda mechanism at work. It isn't that the ad lies about anything it states — every individual claim in the transcript is true as far as it goes. The mechanism is substitution: a member of the military responsible for a mass amputee-producing war is positioned, through an unqualified universal claim, as the voice speaking to and for amputees as a category — while the population most affected by that same war is never acknowledged as existing.

The Single Shoe Service itself is also narrower than "all amputees" suggests: it launched in Europe in January 2026 across 23 Adidas-owned stores, reaching Israel in August 2026, and applies only to in-stock footwear at Adidas-owned physical stores — not online, not third-party retailers, not Gaza.

This is not Adidas's first controversy at this fault line. In July 2024, the company withdrew and revised an advertising campaign featuring Palestinian-American model Bella Hadid for its SL72 trainers, after the Israeli government's official account publicly objected to her inclusion, and the American Jewish Committee called her selection "either a massive oversight or intentionally inflammatory." Adidas apologized twice, calling the connection to the 1972 Munich Olympics "unintentional," and revised the campaign. [5]

The platform's existing framework — built primarily for analyzing media coverage — identifies techniques like passive voice erasure, epistemic asymmetry, and pattern omission. This campaign exhibits three of the platform's established techniques, adapted to a corporate-marketing context.

None of these fully capture what makes this campaign distinct, however. Media institutional silence is a choice not to cover something. This is a brand actively producing content that claims to speak for a category it has excluded — which requires a new entry.

Distinct from pattern omission (not noting repetition) and from institutional silence (declining to cover): victim substitution is about who gets to represent the harm — a party found responsible for mass injury repositioned, through omission, as the spokesperson for injury itself.

This is not a novel pattern in the academic literature — this campaign is better understood as a specific instance of a documented one. Disability studies scholars have already named and analyzed this exact mechanism as applied to Israel specifically:

Jasbir Puar's The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Duke University Press, 2017) theorizes how the Israeli state pairs a "right to kill" with a "right to maim," using liberal disability-rights frameworks to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies. [A3]

Disability studies scholar Helen Meekosha's "Decolonising Disability: Thinking and Acting Globally" (Disability & Society, 2011) argues that disabled populations in the Global South are frequently "produced" by wars fought over resources and territorial control — a framework Palestinian disability advocates and scholars have since applied directly to Gaza. [A4]

Building on the term "pinkwashing" — coined by Ali Abunimah (2010) and analyzed at length in Sarah Schulman's Israel/Palestine and the Queer International (Duke University Press, 2012), which documents Israel's "Brand Israel" strategy of using LGBTQ-rights messaging to divert attention from the occupation [A5] — disability advocates and scholars (Bassily, 2021; Issa, 2025) have named the parallel pattern "disability-washing" or "access-washing": promoting accessibility and disability-inclusion initiatives while simultaneously producing mass disablement through military violence. [A6][A7]

Robert McRuer's "Disability Nationalism in Crip Times" (Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 2010) further develops the vocabulary for how national projects recruit disability identity and inclusion narratives into service of state legitimacy. [A8]

These sources ground the propaganda/framing techniques identified above in established scholarship. They are cited for theoretical framework, not as factual sources on Gaza casualty data — those claims are sourced separately above.