The petition names one act. The tour books eight more.
A pro-Israel group wants Macklemore off Ed Sheeran’s tour after he said “Free Palestine” at MetLife Stadium.
By The Weekend · · 4 min read
Macklemore said two words onstage at MetLife Stadium on September 4 — "Free Palestine" — and by the following Monday, an organization representing more than 150,000 Israeli Americans had a petition demanding he lose his job. He is currently booked to open eight more stadium shows on Ed Sheeran's Loop Tour, through early November. The petition doesn't ask him to change his views. It asks whether an opening slot on someone else's tour comes with a script.
A four-time Grammy winner, a stadium of 82,500, and a two-word plea
The setting matters here more than usual. MetLife Stadium holds roughly 82,500 people for a concert configuration, and Sheeran's Loop Tour has been selling it out on back-to-back nights. Macklemore opened both shows on September 4 and 5. On the first night he performed "Hind's Hall," a protest song he released in May 2024 in support of Gaza and campus demonstrations, and told the crowd he wanted people "all the way in Gaza to the occupied West Bank" to hear him say "Free Palestine." On the second night, after a day of backlash, he didn't walk it back — he extended it, naming Lebanon, Cuba, Congo, Sudan, and, pointedly, US immigration enforcement, calling ICE "this terrorist organization."
That escalation is the part worth sitting with. A quieter artist facing organized pressure after night one might have trimmed the message for night two. Macklemore added five more countries and a domestic target. Whatever else this is, it isn't hedging.
The petition's actual ask is narrower than the outrage around it
The Israeli-American Council's petition doesn't argue Macklemore lacks the right to hold these views — it says so explicitly. Its claim is about venue and consent: "This was an Ed Sheeran concert – not a political rally, not a protest, and not an activist event." The organization wants tour leadership to disclose whether Macklemore's speech and the "Hind's Hall" performance were pre-approved, and it wants the remaining eight dates to proceed without him.
That framing — permission, not politics — is the version of this argument that tends to survive contact with a lawyer. Sheeran's representatives had not responded to requests for comment by the time the story broke, which leaves the tour's actual policy on opener content an open question rather than a confirmed one.
Opening acts have said this before. The stadiums got bigger.
Political statements from support slots aren't new — the Dixie Chicks lost country radio airplay over one sentence about the Iraq War in 2003, and Ye's stage invasions have shadowed awards shows for two decades. What's changed since is scale and speed. A comment made to 82,500 people on a Friday becomes a petition by Sunday and a wire story by Monday, because a phone-recorded clip travels faster than a publicist can respond to it. The controversy cycle used to take a news cycle. Now it takes a weekend.
The Israel-Hamas war has also produced its own genre of tour-adjacent flashpoints — artists pulled from festival lineups, co-headliners splitting over statements, sponsors quietly stepping back. Macklemore's situation differs in one respect: he isn't the headliner facing a boycott of his own show. He's the opener whose remarks are now attached to someone else's brand, on someone else's stage, in front of someone else's paying audience. That's a specific kind of exposure, and it's the reason the petition targets his removal rather than a ticket refund.
Nobody has said what the contract actually allows
Here is the constraint nobody in the coverage addresses directly: opener contracts on stadium tours routinely include content clauses — restrictions on merchandise, stage time, sometimes material. Whether Sheeran's tour has one, and whether "Hind's Hall" or the Free Palestine remarks fall inside or outside it, is exactly the disclosure the petition is demanding and exactly the thing Sheeran's camp hasn't confirmed or denied. Until that contract language surfaces, every argument about whether Macklemore "should" be removed is really an argument about what people assume a tour contract says, not what it does say.
The open question is who actually decides
Sheeran hasn't spoken publicly on this. That silence is doing real work: it lets the petition and Macklemore's response both exist without a referee. If Sheeran says nothing before the next date, that itself is a decision — it keeps Macklemore on eight more stages and treats the controversy as the opener's to manage alone. If Sheeran's team responds to press requests with a policy statement, that resolves the disclosure question the petition is actually asking. Neither has happened yet, and the next scheduled date is the real deadline, not the petition's signature count.
Has Macklemore been removed from any dates?
No. As of the petition's filing, he remains listed for the tour's remaining eight US stadium shows between mid-September and early November.
Did Ed Sheeran comment on the remarks?
Not publicly. Multiple outlets, including The Hollywood Reporter, said Sheeran's representatives did not respond to requests for comment.