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Grammy-winning artist Macklemore opened as a supporting act for Ed Sheeran's "Loop Tour" at his MetLife Stadium show Sept. 4. Macklemore performed "Hind's Hall," his song about Columbia's pro-Palestinian encampment.
"One of the reasons why I wanted to come on this tour,” he said before the performance, “was because I wanted to stand up here on stages and stadiums across America and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart: Free Palestine."
Within days, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft called Ed Sheeran directly with an ultimatum to either drop Macklemore from the tour or cancel the upcoming show at Gillette Stadium, home of the Patriots. Along with Kraft, the owners of several other NFL stadiums Sheeran's tour was expected to stop at allegedly threatened to cancel, Macklemore said. Only Kraft confirmed the decision and the call with Sheeran, citing what he described as "antisemitic rhetoric" and material "hurtful to the Jewish community” from Macklemore.
By Sept. 15, Macklemore was off the tour. All the other remaining opening acts — Aaron Rowe, Finneas, Lukas Graham and backing band Beoga — quit in solidarity.
Sheeran responded, calling the "conflict between Israel and Palestine” a "human tragedy" but ultimately took a more neutral position.
“I am not complicit,” Sheeran said in a post to Instagram. “I have my personal views on this devastating conflict. Just because I choose not to speak publicly, it doesn’t mean I don’t have them, and it doesn’t mean I don’t care. Nor does it mean I don’t support causes in my own, personal way.”
It reads as a deliberately safe answer — the kind meant to avoid picking a side rather than actually saying something.
Macklemore didn't let it sit. He pledged his full $1 million in tour earnings to Palestinian aid groups and challenged Kraft to match it. Kraft went further, revealing Sheeran had already quietly pledged $2 million before any of this became public, then donating $2 million more of his own to aid groups in the region.
Then, at Sheeran’s first show since the fallout, two local Philadelphia groups, the Philly Palestine Coalition and Shut Down D&Z, organized a protest, gathering outside about an hour before the Sept. 19 show.
Their social media post read: "Ed Sheeran plays at Lincoln Financial Field on Saturday, his first show after caving to Zionist threats and dropping Macklemore as his opening act."
During the show, Sheeran finally said the war in Gaza is "catastrophic and unjustifiable,” and he had mishandled the situation.
Sheeran's donation to aid groups only makes sense if he truly understands the severity of the crisis in Gaza. Yet, he tries to maintain a public posture of "neutrality" that avoids assigning any responsibility for the conflict.
That contradiction only matters if the underlying conflict is as even as Sheeran's "both sides" framing implies. In 2025, the United Nations’ Independent International Commission of Inquiry, the body the UN Human Rights Council created specifically to investigate this war, concluded after a two-year investigation that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. It found that Israel committed four of the five genocidal acts defined under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and cited statements by senior Israeli officials as evidence of intent to destroy Palestinians as a group.
Both Hamas and Israel have been accused of war crimes to different extents: Hamas for the Oct. 7, 2023, attack which left around 1,200 people dead and 251 taken hostage, as well as rocket fire launched into civilian areas, and Israel for its indiscriminate and excessively violent actions in Gaza. However, the UN's own Commission of Inquiry, the body created to investigate the war, went further and formally concluded that Israel is responsible for genocide in Gaza.
Once that imbalance is established, Sheeran's defense collapses. His claim that he is not complicit while also not taking a stance against oppression is a fallacy. The logic underneath it is that complicity requires action, and silence is the absence of action, so silence can't be complicity. But Sheeran did not act neutrally.
He was the person with the authority to keep Macklemore on the bill, and he didn't use it. He said he "spoke with the venues at length all week to try to build a bridge," which means he negotiated. He had leverage, and the outcome he accepted was removal.
A choice made under pressure is still a choice. Pointing to the promoter doesn't undo the fact that Sheeran's name was the one drawing a crowd into Kraft’s stadium, and Sheeran's decision not to walk was why the ultimatum was possible in the first place.
His stated reason, that his audience includes young people who "do not expect a political forum," treats the stage itself as neutral ground he's protecting. But the stage stopped being neutral the moment a stadium owner used his ownership of it to decide who could speak there. Sheeran didn't keep politics out of the show. He let Kraft's politics override Macklemore's and called the result an absence of politics.
A neutral outcome would have looked like both artists staying on stage saying nothing, or both saying something. What happened instead was one side's speech being physically removed from stadiums by ownership pressure, while the other's absence of speech was rewarded with a completed tour. That is not neutrality. It is one side winning, wearing the language of balance as cover.
Max Moore (he/him) is a senior studying political science and journalism.
