HATING WITH THE HADIDS: How a family of social media titans fights Israel

Collectively, the family boasts 135 million Instagram followers, which is roughly the population of Israel 15 times over.

By Rachel O’Donoghue, Honest Reporting

It is no exaggeration to say that the reach of the Hadid family is so immense that a social media post from one of them has the power to influence countless people.

Collectively, the Hadid family boasts 135 million Instagram followers, which is roughly the population of Israel 15 times over.

To paraphrase the French writer Voltaire, with great power comes great responsibility. Yet considering their propensity for spreading misinformation about Israel, Voltaire’s maxim is one that the Hadids have no conception of.

For example, Nazareth-born real estate magnate Mohamed Hadid seems to have no qualms about smearing the Jewish state, such as when he recently claimed the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was a “proud Palestinian.”

Just this week, supermodel Bella Hadid took a page out of her father’s book, when she shared on her Instagram stories a post written by her cousin Lina that suggested Israel was occupying land that had been Palestinian for “4,000 years,” in addition to the claim that “Jesus was a Palestinian.”

With regards to the assertion that the land has been Palestinian for 4,000 years, HonestReporting has previously addressed this fantastic example of historical revisionism:

Palestine, or officially “Provincia Syria Palaestina,” was a name invented by the Romans in 135 CE as a replacement for “Judea,” in an effort to eliminate all expressions of Jewry in the region following the defeat of Bar Kohba in the Jewish rebellion against the Roman Empire. Similarly, Jerusalem was officially renamed Aelia Capitolina.

In fact, the Muslim conquest of the Levant did not occur until the early part of the 17th century, when Muslim armies began to take over large swathes of the Middle East.

Furthermore, the suggestion that Jesus was a Palestinian is also incorrect: Jesus was born in Judea and was identified as Jew. Indeed, the cross upon which Jesus is said to have been crucified was inscribed with INRI — Iesvs Nazarenvs Rex Ivdaeorvm — which means “Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews” in Latin.

Hadids and Hamas take aim at Israel

Unfortunately, this is not the first time Bella Hadid or her famous siblings have been caught spreading misinformation that seeks to undermine the legitimacy of the Jewish state.

Last May, when Israel was forced to defend itself after Gaza’s terrorist rulers Hamas fired a salvo of rockets at Jerusalem, Bella used her huge social media reach to claim that Israel is not a country, but rather a “group of settlers, who are colonizing Palestine.”

In the now-deleted post, the model also claimed there was no “fighting” — despite the rockets that fell in Israeli towns and cities proving otherwise — and said that Israel was guilty of “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid” — two fallacious claims that have been thoroughly debunked on numerous occasions.

Meanwhile, Bella’s supermodel sister Gigi has also spread her fair share of malicious anti-Israel propaganda, such as a post from March in which she compared the plight of Ukrainians following the invasion of their country by Russia to the situation felt by Palestinians:

I am pledging to donate my earnings from the Fall 2022 [fashion] shows to aid those suffering from the war in Ukraine, as well as continuing to support those experiencing the same in Palestine. Our eyes and hearts must be open to all human injustice. May we all see each other as brothers and sisters, beyond politics, beyond race, beyond religion. At the the end of the day, innocent lives pay for war – not leaders.” [emphasis added]

Earth to Gigi Hadid: Ukraine, ‘Palestine’ not the same

A massive dose of ahistoricism is required to make Gigi’s comparison. As such, a cold splash of reality is in order. Specifically, when Israel captured a number of territories during the Six-Day War it did so while fighting for its very survival against an onslaught by armies from neighboring Arab countries. A Palestinian state did not exist then, just as it does not exist today. Those captured territories, which Jerusalem offered to return in exchange for peace, were in fact taken from three countries that were aiming to eliminate Israel: Syria, Jordan and Egypt.

Ukraine, on the other hand, has never attacked or threatened to attack Russia. The latter is not acting in self-defense as Israel consistently has.

Gigi’s “solidarity” with Palestinians has veered into the utterly banal, such as her later-deleted post of artwork with the quote, “You Will Not Erase Palestine.”

Of course, the oft-used assertion that Israel is on some nefarious mission to “erase” Palestinians or their imagined state totally ignores the salient fact that Israel has repeatedly attempted to see the actualization of a Palestinian state via multiple peace deals. As we know, these have all been turned down by a Palestinian leadership that is hellbent on taking a path of perpetual rejectionism.

As an aside, any insinuation that Israel is seeking to drive out Palestinians is simply not grounded in reality considering their numbers have grown exponentially since Israel’s establishment in 1948.

Meet baby brother Anwar Hadid

The lesser known Hadid sibling, Anwar, allegedly a model in his own right, has not even tried to mask his antisemitism and animus towards Israelis.

In May of last year, leaked messages from the 23-year-old show that he sent messages to an Israeli woman, Taylor Amrani, in which he called for the deaths of all members of the Israel Defense Forces, saying he wished to see them “erased from the planet.”

In another message sent in response to an image of a 13-year-old girl who had been stabbed to death by Palestinian terrorists, Anwar Hadid glibly replied that “at least she had a home to sleep in.”

And perhaps revealing his tenuous understanding of Israeli-Palestinian affairs, the youngest of the Hadid siblings reportedly revealed to Amrani his belief that Israel’s first president Chaim Weizmann is Israel’s leader.

Fact check, Anwar: Chaim Weizmann died in 1952.

Father knows least: Family patriarch Mohamed Hadid

In the case of the Hadid children, it seems that the apples do not fall far from the tree. Their father Mohamed has been called out for sharing some of the most egregious lies about the Jewish state imaginable, such as in 2020 when he attempted to link American police brutality to Israel.

Although he later apologized for the Instagram post, it rang somewhat hollow when just two months later he attributed a false quote to Jewish physicist Albert Einstein that compared Zionists to Nazi Germany.

Of course, the Hadids are far from the only celebrities who have taken aim at Israel; publicly expressing such opinions is now practically de rigueur among notable members of the glitterati.

Despite their breathtaking ignorance, the combined social media following of the Hadid clan makes their frequent attacks against the world’s only Jewish state both profoundly disturbing and crucial to call out.

Anti-Israel PropagandaBella HadidHonest ReportingMohamed HadidSocial media