> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # When the Inclusion Stops at Israelis - URL: https://goodoil.news/when-the-inclusion-stops-at-israelis/ - Published: 2026-09-28T23:00:03.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-28T23:00:02.000Z - Description: Nationality is not culpability. Shalev Biton did not need Adidas to endorse his politics. He did not need it to endorse the IDF. He needed one shoe. Adidas should never have apologised for selling it to him. - Author: Reproduced with permission - Tags: World Politics, Israel, Business [**Greg Bouwer**](https://israelinstitute.nz/2026/09/when-inclusion-stops-at-israelis/?ref=goodoil.news) *IINZ* There was nothing inherently political about Adidas Israel’s campaign. The company was promoting its ‘Single Shoe’ service, an accessibility initiative for amputees and others with limb differences who need only one shoe. Rather than requiring such customers to purchase a pair when half of that pair may be useless to them, the programme allows eligible customers to purchase a single shoe. To promote the service in Israel, Adidas featured 11 disabled athletes. One was Shalev Biton. ![](https://israelinstitute.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/7e9ff38e-f134-40be-9dc4-2cbcaf99a6a2_738x414.webp) Biton runs with a prosthetic leg. In May 2021, while serving in the IDF’s Nahal Brigade during Operation Guardian of the Walls, he was seriously wounded when an anti-tank missile fired from Gaza struck the military vehicle in which he was travelling near Netiv Ha’asara, on the Israeli side of the Gaza border. Staff Sgt Omer Tabib was killed in the attack. Biton’s left leg was subsequently amputated. Five years later, Adidas featured Biton not as a soldier, but as an athlete with a disability. The campaign did not celebrate the IDF. It did not discuss the current war in Gaza. It did not present Biton as a military hero. His promotional material reportedly made no reference to his military service or to the circumstances in which he lost his leg. He was there because he was an amputee. Then activists discovered who he was. And suddenly inclusion became complicated. ### **The wrong kind of disabled person** Calls to boycott Adidas followed. Actor Javier Bardem was among those amplifying the campaign through his Instagram Stories. He accused Adidas of choosing a man with “blood on his hands”. Other criticism contrasted Biton’s inclusion with the enormous number of Palestinians who have suffered amputations during the war in Gaza. That Palestinian suffering is real and should not be minimised. World Health Organization figures cited in reporting on the controversy put the number of traumatic limb amputations in Gaza since October 2023 at more than 5,000. Those people deserve treatment, rehabilitation, dignity and recognition. Adidas could feature Palestinian amputees. It could support rehabilitation programmes in Gaza. It could extend its Single Shoe initiative to Palestinians. It could even feature Israeli and Palestinian amputees together. There is no contradiction between recognising the terrible injuries suffered by Palestinians and recognising that an Israeli who has lost a leg is also entitled to participate in an accessibility campaign. Yet that was not the demand. The demand was to boycott Adidas because it had included Biton. That is something quite different. Palestinian suffering does not require Israeli invisibility. ### **A story built on a false timeline** There was another problem with the campaign against Biton. Some of its central claims were simply false. Biton did not lose his leg in the current Gaza war. He was wounded on 12 May 2021 – more than two years before Hamas’s attack of 7 October 2023 and the war that followed. Nor was he wounded fighting inside Gaza. An anti-tank missile was fired *from Gaza into Israel*, striking his military vehicle near Netiv Ha’asara. Tabib was killed and Biton was seriously wounded. Yet online attacks recast Biton as a participant in the current war and implicated him in accusations of ‘genocide’. The chronology matters. One can criticise Israel’s conduct in Gaza. One can demand investigations of particular military actions. One can argue that Israeli politicians or soldiers should be held accountable where there is evidence of wrongdoing. But none of those arguments changes what happened to Shalev Biton in May 2021\. He did not lose his leg in this war. He did not lose it fighting inside Gaza. And his Adidas appearance did not promote military action at all. Remarkably, Adidas itself acknowledged important parts of this. ### **Adidas rejected the claims — and apologised** Adidas did not merely issue a generic apology while remaining silent about the accusations circulating against Biton. According to reporting on the company’s response, Adidas rejected claims that Biton had fought in the current Gaza war or was implicated in ‘genocide’. It also rejected suggestions that the Single Shoe programme was an initiative specifically for Israeli soldiers. Those corrections are significant. The campaign was not an IDF campaign. The Single Shoe programme was not created for Israeli soldiers. Biton was not presented as a participant in the current Gaza war. And some of the most inflammatory allegations being circulated against him were false. Yet in the same response, Adidas apologised: “It was never our intent to cause offense and we apologise for anyone affected.” There is some ambiguity in reporting over precisely which part of Adidas issued the response. Anadolu attributed the apology to Adidas Arabia, while Israeli reporting attributed substantially the same response to the company’s global headquarters. But that does not alter the central contradiction. The correction and apology appear to have formed part of the same corporate response. Adidas was rejecting important allegations driving the outrage while simultaneously apologising for the offence caused by the campaign. So what exactly required an apology? - Not presenting Biton as a participant in the current war. Adidas had not done that. - Not glorifying the IDF. The campaign had not done that either. - Not creating a programme specifically for Israeli soldiers. Adidas itself rejected that claim. Strip those allegations away and what remains? Shalev Biton. An Israeli amputee. A former Israeli soldier. A disabled athlete appearing in an Israeli accessibility campaign. Adidas was perfectly entitled to say something very simple: The allegations are false and Shalev Biton remains entitled to be included. It didn’t. ### **When boycott reaches the individual** This episode exposes a broader problem with the logic of boycotting Israel. BDS and similar campaigns are commonly presented as directed against Israeli government policies, institutions and organisations alleged to be complicit in them. But once being Israeli becomes evidence of complicity, there is no obvious stopping point before the individual. Universities can be pressured over relationships with Israeli academics. Cultural organisations can be pressured over Israeli performers. Sporting bodies can be pressured over Israeli athletes. Businesses can be targeted for operating in Israel. And an accessibility campaign can be targeted because one of the disabled people it includes is Israeli. This is not to suggest that these forms of boycott developed in some neat chronological sequence. They did not. Nor does every supporter of an institutional boycott necessarily support excluding individual Israelis. The problem is that the underlying logic offers remarkably little protection against that outcome. If an Israeli institution is presumed culpable because it is Israeli, and an organisation dealing with that institution can become culpable by association, what principle prevents an individual Israeli from eventually facing the same test? Biton’s case provides an uncomfortable answer. The question ceases to be: *What has this person done?* It becomes: *Who is this person?* Nationality becomes evidence. Association becomes culpability. Identity replaces individual conduct. ### **Military service as a permanent stain** Biton’s previous IDF service matters here because military service is an ordinary biographical fact for a substantial proportion of Israeli adults. Israel has compulsory service for much of its Jewish population, as well as Druze and Circassian men, while others volunteer. If previous IDF service is itself enough to make someone unsuitable for an advertising campaign, academic programme, cultural event or sporting competition, the supposed distinction between boycotting Israeli institutions and boycotting Israelis becomes remarkably thin. Such a standard can exclude people who have never been accused of wrongdoing, including people who served decades ago or in roles wholly unrelated to whatever policy is currently being protested. In Biton’s case, his connection to the current Gaza war had to be manufactured after the fact. There is a basic distinction here. Holding someone responsible for something he has actually done is accountability. Treating him as culpable because of his nationality or collective affiliation is something else entirely. ### **Inclusion, with exceptions** The irony is difficult to miss. Corporate advertising is saturated with the language of diversity, accessibility and inclusion. Disabled people should not be invisible. People with limb differences should be able to participate fully in society. Products should accommodate them rather than treating them as afterthoughts. Shalev Biton was precisely the sort of person such a campaign would ordinarily be expected to feature. He is an athlete. He has a limb difference. He runs with a prosthetic leg. And Adidas offers a service designed to address a mundane but genuine problem faced by people like him: why should someone who needs one shoe have to buy two? On every ordinary measure, Biton belonged in the campaign. Then another characteristic became more important. He is an Israeli. More remarkably, Adidas reportedly acknowledged that some of the allegations against him were false in the same response in which it apologised for the controversy. The company was correcting misinformation while simultaneously treating the outrage surrounding that misinformation as something requiring an apology. That exposes how quickly the fashionable language of inclusion can collapse when applying it becomes politically uncomfortable. Inclusion that applies only to people whose inclusion attracts no organised opposition is not much of a principle. It is marketing. ### **There was another response available** Adidas did not need to endorse Israel’s government. It did not need to endorse the IDF. It did not need to defend Israel’s conduct in Gaza. And it certainly did not need to minimise Palestinian suffering. It could simply have said that the Single Shoe programme exists for people with limb differences, that Shalev Biton is an amputee athlete and was included for that reason, and that disabled people do not lose their entitlement to dignity and inclusion because of their nationality. Adidas could then have gone further. It could have supported Palestinian amputees. It could have expanded the Single Shoe initiative. It could have supported rehabilitation programmes for Palestinians who have suffered limb loss. It could even have brought Israeli and Palestinian amputees together in a future campaign based on the proposition that a missing limb is a missing limb, irrespective of the passport carried by the person who lost it. That would have been inclusion worthy of the name. Instead, Adidas reportedly rejected important falsehoods being circulated about Biton while apologising for the offence caused by the campaign in the same response. In effect, it told its critics that parts of their case against Biton were untrue – while simultaneously conceding that his inclusion warranted corporate contrition. The lesson for activists will not be difficult to understand. Apply enough pressure and the presence of an Israeli can become something for which a multinational company feels obliged to apologise. ### **A principle Adidas should understand** Adidas’s own history makes the principle particularly uncomfortable. That history should not be used to assign collective guilt to today’s company or its employees for events generations ago. Quite the opposite: it illustrates why collective guilt is such a dangerous principle. Adidas deserves to be judged for what Adidas does today. Shalev Biton deserves the same courtesy. Judge him for what *he* has done. If there is evidence that Biton committed a crime, produce it. If there is evidence that he participated in atrocities, establish it. If there is evidence that his Adidas appearance glorified military action, show it. But if the objection ultimately reduces to the fact that he is an Israeli who once wore an IDF uniform, then the objection is no longer based on individual conduct. It is based on identity. ### **The real test of inclusion** Human rights mean something precisely because they are universal. So does inclusion. A Palestinian child who has lost a leg deserves compassion, medical treatment, rehabilitation and the opportunity to live a full life. An Israeli who has lost a leg deserves the same. Recognising one does not erase the other. Nothing about Palestinian suffering requires Israelis to become invisible. Nothing about criticising the Israeli government requires ordinary Israelis to assume collective culpability for everything their government does. And nothing about opposing a war requires turning an accessibility campaign into a nationality test. The controversy surrounding Shalev Biton therefore raises a question considerably larger than Adidas: *Can an Israeli participate in ordinary international cultural, academic, sporting and commercial life without first being required to answer for the actions of his country?* Governments can be criticised. Military actions can be investigated. Institutions can be held accountable for their own conduct. Individuals can be held responsible for things they themselves have done. But nationality is not culpability. Shalev Biton did not need Adidas to endorse his politics. He did not need it to endorse the IDF. He needed one shoe. Adidas should never have apologised for selling it to him. This article was originally published by the [Israel Institute of New Zealand](https://israelinstitute.nz/2026/09/when-inclusion-stops-at-israelis/?ref=goodoil.news).