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’.
Despite Macklemore’s specific declaration that criticism of Israel is not synonymous with hostility towards Jewish people, Carr’s response that criticism of Israel is ‘by connection’ an attack on Jewish people shows that it’s the Zionists who claim that the Isareli state acts on behalf of all the world’s Jews.
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. Macklemore later accused Kraft of encouraging other stadium owners to take the same position.
Messina Touring Group, promoting 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—the headline act on which the entire tour, ticket sales and advertising revenue depended—claimed it wasn’t his decision. Reading from a teleprompter on stage 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’, and said he was ‘deeply worried’ by the prospect of venues seeking to approve performers’ material in advance. While he managed to equate the violence of the oppressor with the resistance of the oppressed, he notably failed to offer any defence of his supposed friend Macklemore, and his right to speak out on Palestine.
Get The Spark in your inbox
Workers Power’s weekly newsletter
Why now?
None of Macklemore’s views on Gaza were new. He released Hind’s Hall, which references the Columbia university occupation’s symbolic renaming of Hamilton Hall after Hind Rajab, a five year old girl killed in Gaza, in 2024, and has spoken repeatedly about Palestine since then. What was new was the size of his 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 that has been embedded in US foreign policy for decades. Washington does not support Israel from altruism or lobbying. 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 therefore have 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 shift turned into serious political confrontation. The Trump administration froze or threatened federal funding and used immigration powers against foreign students involved in Palestine protests. At Columbia, dozens of 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.
Free Palestine goes mainstream
The Macklemore affair shows that the solidarity movement is spreading beyond the campuses and into mass culture. Opinions 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. Robert Kraft’s latest attempt to stop it is itself a measure of how far the political ground has shifted.
Inevitably, dropping Macklemore only escalated the controversy. Supporting artists Finneas, Lukas Graham and Aaron Rowe withdrew from the remaining dates, as did Sheeran’s own backing band Beoga.
Macklemore was rightly 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.’
‘Free Palestine’ has broken out of the campuses and the solidarity movement and into American mass culture. That is a measure of how far public opinion has moved, but also of the gulf that still exists between mass sentiment and political power.
The slaughter in Gaza has continued despite that shift because the governments arming and backing Israel remain insulated from it—so far. The strategic question now is how that sympathy can be converted into organised social and political pressure: in workplaces and trade unions, in mass movements, and against the governments in Washington, London and Brussels whose support makes Israel’s war possible.
