Which Side Is Ed Sheeran On?

Ed Sheeran opened his Philadelphia show Saturday night by admitting to “making mistakes”—maybe not quite the apology some people were hoping for. It was the star musician’s first performance since billionaire Robert Kraft pressured Sheeran and his team to remove Macklemore from his stadium tour over the rapper’s pro-Palestinian comments onstage. Sheeran, who seemed to be reading from a teleprompter, told the audience he has tried to avoid being an “activist musician” or “a political commentator of any kind” throughout his career because he wants his music to be “about unity, not division, about humanity, not politics.” He said he recognized that the October 7 Hamas attack and “what is happening in Gaza,” which he called “catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate,” was a “humanitarian issue.” “This concert is still a place where everyone is welcome and everyone here can stand beside people that have opposing views,” Sheeran continued. “I am deeply worried about the idea that venues pre-approve content performers,” he said. “It should never happen in the free world.” He did not mention Kraft by name or comment on the billionaire’s reasoning for demanding Macklemore’s removal. In a statement last week, Kraft wrote in part: “Based on Macklemore’s recent actions, material shared from the stage during Ed Sheeran’s shows in New Jersey, and a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery that we believe has been deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community, we determined that his participation in the September 25th and 26th concerts at Gillette Stadium would cross that line.” Kraft has a long history of donating to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, an organization that raises funds for IDF soldiers, veterans, and families, and the United Democracy Project, a super PAC backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to elect pro-Israel candidates. During shows at MetLife Stadium earlier this month, Macklemore advocated for Palestinian freedom and called Israel’s actions “genocide”—a designation most scholars of the subject would agree with. Shortly after Macklemore was taken off Sheeran’s tour, all four of the remaining opening acts withdrew out of solidarity. Just before starting his Saturday show, Sheeran said that the recent developments put him “in the middle of an important and passionate argument about freedom of speech and the most complex political issue on the planet.” His comments, which echoed a social media statement he made last Tuesday, are unlikely to appease critics who accuse him of complicity with Kraft. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, for one, took issue with his “attempts to ‘both-sides’ Israel’s ongoing genocide.” Sheeran claims to support peace, the group said, “yet fails to even mention its crucial condition—justice.” All five opening acts took significant financial hits by dropping out of the tour—as of April, Sheeran was the sixth-most streamed artist on Spotify of all time. And Sheeran failed to back them up on a subject where one cannot credibly walk a line down the middle. At the end of Saturday’s performance, Sheeran told the crowd that he wanted to “apologize for the first bit of the show,” noting that families with children did not buy their tickets to hear him talking about something other than “unity” and “love” and “family.” “The last week of my life has been one of the worst weeks of my life,” he said, thanking the crowd for their support. “I really didn’t know whether I’d be even getting onstage again, whether I even wanted to be an artist at all.”