The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a founding member of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement, calls on Ed Sheeran to cancel his now compromised US tour. Until then, we call on opening artists, audience members and, where possible, crew members to boycott the complicit tour.
Ed Sheeran and his team removed long-time friend and prominent artist Macklemore from his US tour for saying “Free Palestine” on stage, reportedly on the pretext that those words, and the Palestinian flag, are “hurtful” to some. This a perpetuation of anti-Palestinian racist talking points – coming from one of the world’s biggest artists.
Sheeran’s decision follows coordinated pressure from Robert Kraft and Miriam Adelson—anti-Palestinian Zionist billionaires who are deeply complicit in Israel’s apartheid, illegal occupation, and genocide. Kraft owns Gillette Stadium, a stop on Sheeran’s tour. He is one of AIPAC’s top donors and a prominent supporter of “Friends of the IDF”—Israel’s military force that is on the UN “List of Shame” for committing horrific violations against Palestinian children specifically.
Adelson is the controlling owner of Las Vegas Sands Corp, including Hard Rock Live, which is also a stop on the tour. She is the primary financial benefactor of the anti-Palestinian lobby group, the Israeli-American Council, a top donor to the genocidal Zionist Organization of America, and a major financial backer of Israeli settlements on illegally occupied Indigenous Palestinian land—a war crime under international law. Together with her late husband, she has also poured more than $600 million into Trump's presidential campaigns in return for political favors supporting the Israeli fascist government’s “Greater Israel” colonial project.
Sheeran’s US tour is organized by Messina Touring Group, in which AEG Presents has a 50% stake. AEG Presents is the world’s second-biggest live entertainment events promoter, after Live Nation, with major events like Coachella, British Summer Time at Hyde Park and All Points East. It is a subsidiary of the Anschutz Corporation, owned by evangelical Christian billionaire Philip F. Anschutz. The conglomerate’s charitable arm the Anschutz Foundation has reportedly donated millions of dollars to organizations supporting Israel’s atrocity crimes against Palestinians, as well as far-right US groups.
Macklemore has bravely and consistently spoken out about Israel’s genocide, which has killed at least 80,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including over 21,000 children, in the last three years, and likely far more. Israel, after all, has not only systematically destroyed the conditions for sustaining Palestinian life, but also our ability to count our own dead. This ongoing genocide has been committed in full view of the world, enabled by the US, Germany, the UK and other states.
The genocide has also been enabled by the absolute dehumanization of Palestinians in the mainstream media, and in popular culture, as Palestinian artists have repeatedly affirmed. Sheeran, who has never even spoken out against the British government arming and otherwise enabling Israel’s genocide, apartheid and illegal occupation, has crossed the line from complicit silence into seemingly peddling in anti-Palestinian racist propaganda that, regardless of intentions, can only whitewash the genocide.
Furthermore, being a prominent artist of the UK – a state that is uniquely responsible for enabling the Nakba, the Zionist gangs’ ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinians from their homeland and the resultant establishment of a supremacist settler-colony on its ruins – makes it a moral duty to speak out about the plight of the Palestinian people.
Sheeran – whose net worth is estimated at more than $500m – reportedly doesn’t “take sides.” As South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu famously said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” In the context of a genocide, in particular, that is enabled by Western taxes, and given the exponential rise of fascism in the US and Europe, what does it truly mean for an artist to not “take sides”? At such a moment, what is the material price of speaking out, and the moral cost of remaining silent?
Macklemore put it this way:
"Taking a side can cost you. Money, brand deals, sponsorships, festivals, private shows, relationships and access. I've lost all of those things. But there is no neutral position between the oppressor and the oppressed. When one side has the bombs and bottomless financial and military support from America, refusing to take a side doesn't leave you in the middle.”
The billionaire-dictated cancellation of Macklemore’s performances is the latest in a string of McCarthyist attempts by complicit oligarchs, mostly staunch Zionists, to censor and intimidate artists speaking out against Israel’s crimes or even in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice. As with the Ellisons’ recent attacks on Mark Ruffalo, billionaire genocide enablers are making high-profile “examples” of those who stand up for Palestinian rights to create a chilling effect on art workers navigating an increasingly corporatized and consolidated entertainment industry. If left unchecked, this weaponization of labor could have far-reaching implications that threaten the civil liberties and most basic rights of workers.
As a handful of billionaires devise “black lists” of those not loyal to Israel and impose their genocidal agenda on workers and the US public, which has largely abandoned its support for Israel, it is a critical moment for organized labor to act. Unions and trade associations must condemn this McCarthyism 2.0, which revolves around anti-Palestinian racism, and protect the rights of workers to speak out against complicity in grave human rights violations anywhere, in Sudan, Congo, Myanmar, Lebanon, Syria or Palestine.
Despite this billionaire pressure, Sheeran had an opportunity to take a stand in solidarity with Palestinians, like millions of other British and Irish citizens have done, and refuse to cave to the pressure. Sheeran once sang, “You Need Me, I Don’t Need You,” in an apparently defiant message to the music industry. Palestinians don’t ask anything of Ed Sheeran, except to do no harm to our struggle for our rights. He has so far failed to meet this ethical duty. But it is not too late to reverse course.
We deeply appreciate the meaningful solidarity of tens of thousands of musicians and music workers, who have not just amplified our calls for freedom and justice, but have taken meaningful actions of solidarity to resist complicity in Israel’s genocide and settler-colonial apartheid. We recognize that the vast majority of those brave artists are subjected to the financial precarity imposed by the music industry’s monopolizing corporations, like Spotify, Live Nation and the major labels.
As Macklemore said, "if those words cost me the stage, while turning the conversation back to Palestine, then it was the most successful tour I've ever been on."