… on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing

Tag: former Israeli soldier

Adidas apologizes after campaign featuring former Israeli soldier sparks boycott calls
Spread the love
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Adidas shop [Mtaylor848/Wikipedia]
German sportswear company Adidas apologized Monday after an advertising campaign featuring a former Israeli soldier prompted a backlash and calls for a boycott, Anadolu reports.
The campaign featured Shalev Biton, whose left leg was amputated after he was wounded while serving in the Israeli army in 2021, to promote Adidas’s Single Shoe service.
“We recognize that an image used in a recent local activation by the local team has raised concerns and strong reactions,” Adidas said in a statement.
“It was never our intent to cause offense and we apologize for anyone affected,” the company added, describing the promotion as a local initiative rather than part of a global campaign.
Biton was one of 11 disabled athletes featured on posters displayed at Adidas stores in Israel.
Pro-Palestinian activists criticized the decision to include a former Israeli soldier in a campaign centered on amputees, contrasting the promotion with the thousands of Palestinians who have lost limbs during Israel’s war on the Gaza.
READ: Germany approves nearly $930M in arms exports to Israel amid Gaza genocide
World Health Organization estimates published in May said that Gaza had recorded more than 5,000 traumatic limb amputations and over 22,000 major extremity injuries since October 2023. Up to a quarter of those with life-changing injuries were children, according to the organization.
Spanish actor Javier Bardem was among those who urged consumers to boycott the company over the promotion.
Adidas said its Single Shoe service was intended to promote inclusion by allowing people with limb differences to only purchase the shoe they need.
The company introduced the service in 23 European countries in January, offering individual shoes for 50% of the price of a pair at Adidas-owned stores and outlets. It was developed in consultation with disability groups and organizations, including ParalympicsGB.
Adidas said the program was expanding across Europe, Asia and the Middle East, including Palestine, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Egypt.
The company said it would “continue to listen, learn and work to ensure that our actions reflect the inclusive values we stand for.”
READ: Adidas faces boycott calls over Israeli veteran in single-shoe campaign
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Donald Trump sings and dances, says that it’s fun to kill everyone … unless he gets distracted or falls asleep.
Orcas discuss rotting brain, front Orca says he wishes someone would lock him up, small Orca speaks bluntly.
Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.
7 September 2026
Explosive revelations link Labour Together leadership to former IDF soldier
Spread the love
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Labour Together logo
Explosive revelations suggest that Labour Together, the think tank closely associated with former Downing Street Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney, now has an ex-IDF soldier in its leadership. The details were uncovered by parliamentary candidate and campaigner Jody McIntyre, who pointed to earlier reporting describing Labour peer Jonathan Kestenbaum as a former Israeli soldier.
Labour Together remains one of the most politically sensitive organisations in the Starmer orbit: the Guardian has described it as closely linked to McSweeney and central to reshaping Labour after the Corbyn period.
McIntyre, who has made a series of exclusive revelations about Labour and its pro-Israel networks, pointed to a 2010 Jewish Chronicle article describing Kestenbaum-nominated to the House of Lords by the Labour Party leadership in 2010- as “an ex-IDF soldier” and a holder of the Israeli army’s “outstanding soldier award”.
In November 2010, a single paragraph in the Jewish Chronicle described Jonathan Kestenbaum as “an ex-IDF soldier [and] holder of the Israel army’s ‘outstanding soldier award’”.

The claim has never been repeated since.

Kestenbaum now sits on the board of Labour Together. pic.twitter.com/6CmCHv9zPv
— Jody McIntyre (@jodymcintyre_) April 13, 2026

The same Jewish Chronicle piece is still available online, but according to McIntyre this history is absent from much of Kestenbaum’s recent public profile. “What, I wonder, will they make of the arrival in their midst of an ex-IDF soldier, a holder of the Israel army’s “outstanding soldier award”? said the article commenting on Kestenbaum’s appointment to the House of Lords.
McIntyre also drew attention to Kestenbaum’s links to Bnei Akiva, a religious Zionist youth movement whose UK branch says it promotes “a religious Zionist worldview” and seeks to play an active role in the development of the state of Israel.
The revelations fit a broader pattern about the Starmer project’s links to pro-Israel networks. In September last year, McIntyre’s investigation into Morgan McSweeney, reporting that the prime minister’s former chief of staff had, in his youth, lived on Sarid, a Zionist settlement built on the ruins of the Palestinian village of Ikhneifis.
That same report said Labour Together secretly accepted more than £730,000 (around $930,000) in undeclared donations between 2017 and 2020, and linked part of that funding to businessman Trevor Chinn, a longtime backer of Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel.
Read: What is a former Israeli spy doing in the British Labour Party’s head office?
Labour under Keir Starmer has faced questions over support from donors linked to apartheid-era South Africa and pro-Israel lobbying circles. A 2023 report described Labour’s then new megadonor, Gary Lubner, as a pro-Israel businessman whose family company had profited from South African apartheid. Lubner denied the allegations, but the findings added to concerns about the political and financial networks surrounding Starmer’s leadership.
Labour also faced controversy in 2021 over its recruitment of Assaf Kaplan, a former Israeli military intelligence officer from Unit 8200, into a sensitive “social listening” role. Unit 8200 is Israel’s signals intelligence division, often compared to the US National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ.
Unit 8200 has long been dogged by allegations over its surveillance of Palestinians. In 2014, 43 reserve soldiers from the unit publicly accused it of collecting private information on Palestinians not for security purposes, but to facilitate political persecution, coercion and recruitment of informants.
Lawyers challenging Kaplan’s appointment argued that Labour had placed someone linked to such a unit in a role involving political monitoring inside a major British party.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
18 April 2026

Tag: former Israeli soldier

Adidas apologizes after campaign featuring former Israeli soldier sparks boycott calls

Explosive revelations link Labour Together leadership to former IDF soldier