Top model Bella Hadid wants to be able to speak out about the fate of the Palestinians

Supermodel Bella Hadid shares much of her life on social media, including her political beliefs. She says she is censored by Instagram whenever she posts anything about Palestine.

Sometimes Bella Hadid makes the news because she appears in a dazzling dress on the red carpet of, for example, a film festival, which also allows respected magazines and newspapers to post a photo of the supermodel. But mostly it comes to messages along the lines of “Bella and her boyfriend both wear tank tops when they go to the gym.”

All that attention is overwhelming and annoying, she once said in an interview. But at the same time, the model herself shares a large part of her life on social media: photos, videos, tile wisdom and her political beliefs.

Censorship

Even with the latter, 26-year-old Hadid sometimes makes the newspapers: for example, she champions the Black Lives Matter movement and regularly speaks out about the fate of the Palestinians. Last weekend, she commented extensively on social media about the events in Israel and the occupied territories, but says she was censored by Instagram. “As soon as I post about Palestine, I’ll be shadow banned and at least a million fewer followers will see what I have to say,” the model wrote, captioning a tearful eye.

Through shadow ban certain posts would come online, but be much less visible on followers’ timelines – of which Hadid has 51.2 million. It is a fairly elusive phenomenon that influencers more often complain about when a message does not have the reach they hope for. There has been no response from Instagram to Hadid’s allegations. In any case, she says she wants to speak out about the situation in the area, ‘because I am so fed up with the fact that Palestinians have been abused, mistreated and humiliated since my father was born in 1948’.

Beverly Hills

Her father is the Palestinian businessman Mohamed Hadid, who fled with his parents to Syria in 1948 after the establishment of the State of Israel and ended up in Washington at the age of 14. He became a successful property developer, particularly in Beverly Hills, where the family moved when Bella was a toddler. In an interview with the magazine porter the model explains how his background played an important role in her upbringing. “He was religious and prayed with us.” She said she is proud to be Muslim, but stated in other interviews that she feels connected to every religion. “I call on any god who is willing to be there for me.”

Her parents separated when Hadid was 3 years old and Bella was raised in Santa Barbara along with her older sister Gigi and younger brother Anwar – who are both models – by her mother Yolanda van den Herik. Bella’s mother was born in Papendrecht in the Netherlands in 1964, was a successful fashion model and had a second marriage to musician and producer David Foster. She became an American celebrity after starring in the series for a few seasons The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, with the family’s walk-in refrigerator especially impressing the audience. Hadid says she never saw the show and always hid upstairs when it was filming.

clean appearance

‘Thanks to her background, she has become the supermodel she is today,’ says Wilma Wakker of the Amsterdam modeling agency WW Models over the phone. ‘Just like Madonna’s daughter is allowed to walk on shows, while another girl of the same height would be too small for that. Your name counts, because money can be earned with a name, and designers are hooked on that. But Bella Hadid beautiful or talented? She’s not my type, her face and body has been tweaked too much for my taste.’

Hadid did have her nose changed and later regretted it, but she swears she has had no further cosmetic surgery. And that beautiful life of hers is not always so beautiful, Hadid says extensively on social media and in interviews. She has Lyme disease and suffers from it a lot. She sometimes drank too much, but stopped. She always felt that her sister Gigi was better and more beautiful. She has been depressed and posted pictures of themselves with a tearful puffy face on Instagram to support others struggling with life. “People can say anything about my appearance, how I talk or how I behave,” she recently said in an interview with vogue† ‘But I never cancel a job and I’m always on time. No one can claim I’m not working myself to the bone.’