Rapper Macklemore was dropped from the remainder of Ed Sheeran’s US tour after using his opening sets to speak about Gaza and call for a ‘Free Palestine’.
At MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on 4 September, he told the crowd that one reason he had joined the tour was the chance to say those words in front of stadium audiences. The following night he addressed Jewish members of the audience directly: ‘Criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide in no way is a criticism of you.’
The Israeli-American Council responded with a petition demanding his removal. Its chief executive, Elan Carr, accused Macklemore of putting forward a ‘blood libel against the state of Israel, and by connection, the Jewish people’. Speaking to the BBC, Carr went further. ‘Free Palestine’, he claimed, was ‘a call for the extermination of the State of Israel and the Jewish people’.
Macklemore had specifically distinguished criticism of Israel from hostility towards Jewish people. Carr’s response was the textbook Zionist inversion: answering criticism of the Israeli state by identifying it with an attack on Jews as such.
Enter the billionaires
Then Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium, announced that Macklemore would not be allowed to perform at Gillette, where Sheeran is due to play later in the tour. He accused the rapper of crossing the line from political advocacy into rhetoric he regarded as offensive and antisemitic. Macklemore later accused Kraft of encouraging other stadium owners to take the same position.
Messina Touring Group, which promotes the US leg of the tour, then confirmed that venues on forthcoming dates had told it they would not allow concerts to go ahead with Macklemore on the bill. Faced with cancelled stadium dates, the promoter removed him from the tour.
Sheeran said the decision was not his and that he had spent the preceding week trying to reach an agreement with the venues. Returning to the stage in Philadelphia on 19 September, he condemned the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 but also called what is happening in Gaza ‘catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate’. He said he was ‘deeply worried’ by the prospect of venues seeking to approve performers’ material in advance. What he notably failed to do, in this pathetic both-sides drivel read out from a teleprompter was defend his supposed friend Macklemore, and his right to speak out on Palestine.
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Why now?
None of Macklemore’s views on Gaza were new. He released Hind’s Hall in 2024 in support of the student encampments and has spoken repeatedly about Palestine since then. What changed was the size of the platform: now he was making the same arguments while opening some of the biggest concerts in the United States.
Opinion in the US has also moved sharply. Pew Research found this year that 60 per cent of American adults had an unfavourable view of Israel, including 74 per cent of 18 to 34-year-olds. A Washington Post poll of Jewish Americans last year found a similar generational divide: only 36 per cent of those aged 18 to 34 described themselves as emotionally attached to Israel, while half said Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
This change cuts across a relationship embedded in US foreign policy for decades. Washington does not support Israel simply because pro-Israel organisations ask it to. Successive US governments have regarded Israel as a strategic ally, armed it on a vast scale and integrated it into their policy for the Middle East. Zionist organisations in the United States have in turn campaigned to maintain political support for that alliance. The two have therefore had a common interest in preserving a broad American consensus behind Israel.
That consensus is now under severe strain. The destruction of Gaza and continuing US support for Israel have produced opposition on a scale which can no longer be confined to the traditional Palestine solidarity movement, particularly among younger Americans and increasingly among younger American Jews.
Universities were one of the first places where that change manifested as organised political confrontation.
The Trump administration froze or threatened federal funding and used immigration powers against foreign students involved in Palestine protests. At Columbia, students were suspended or expelled over demonstrations while the university negotiated with Washington. It eventually agreed to pay $200 million to settle federal investigations and restore research funding.
The administration says its measures are directed against antisemitism and breaches of civil-rights law. Students, faculty organisations and civil-liberties groups have argued that they have also been used to punish lawful Palestine solidarity activity.
The Macklemore affair shows that the conflict has now moved beyond the campuses and into mass culture. Arguments which university administrations, donors and politicians spent the past three years trying to suppress are now being made in front of tens of thousands of people at stadium concerts. The latest attempt to stop it is itself a measure of how far the political ground has shifted.
All publicity…
Removing Macklemore only escalated the controversy. Supporting artists Finneas, Lukas Graham and Aaron Rowe withdrew from the remaining dates, as did Sheeran’s backing band Beoga.
Macklemore was unapologetic. ‘If those words cost me the stage, while turning the conversation back to Palestine,” he said afterwards, “then it was the most successful tour I’ve ever been on.’
The attempt to silence him instead gave the dispute a much larger audience. What began with a short speech at MetLife has become an international argument about Palestine and about the power of billionaires to control free speech.
The Palestine solidarity movement should use that opening to extend the boycott and organise workers’ action against companies and institutions involved in funding, arming and defending Israel.
