NOBODY says ‘I am not complicit’ unless the question has already crossed their mind.
Singer Ed Sheeran wrote it this week, unprompted, in a statement captioned “It’s important that I set out some facts.” Not facts about Gaza, where the death toll had passed 73,000 by the night of his opening act, but facts about himself.
The sequence matters. On Sept 4, in New Jersey, the rapper Macklemore performed Hind’s Hall, a song named for the Columbia University building that students renamed for Hind Rajab, a five-year-old killed in Gaza. He told the crowd he had wanted this tour so he could stand in stadiums and say two words near to his heart. Free Palestine. The next night he said them again, and added that criticism of Israel was not criticism of Jews. On Sept 6, the Israeli-American Council launched a petition to remove him. On Sept 11, the singer Pink amplified the calls. On Sept 14, the promoter announced he was off the tour, after Robert Kraft, who owns Gillette Stadium, said he would not be welcome there and, by Macklemore’s account, rallied other stadium owners to do the same.
For 10 days Sheeran said nothing.
There is no neutral position between the oppressor and the oppressed.
I want to be careful here, because I am writing from a country where the calculation he made is not unusual and the stakes are considerably higher. We know what it costs to say certain things. We know which sentences require a call to an editor first, which ones get a piece held, which subjects are approached through metaphor or not at all. I could give you a list. I am not going to, and you already know why, and the fact that you know is the whole point. Every journalist reading this in Pakistan has a version of that list, and none of us wrote it down.
So, I recognise the shape of what Sheeran did. The calculation is familiar. What is not familiar is the price. Nobody threatened him. No one was going to arrest him or disappear him or shut down his tour for saying that children should not be killed. The worst that could happen was that some stadium owners would be angry and some ticket sales would suffer. That is the entire risk he was weighing. Ten days of silence bought against that.
There is something clarifying about watching the same instinct operate where the danger is so much smaller. It tells you the instinct is not really about danger.
When he did speak, on Sept 15, it was to explain that the decision had not been his. He had spent the week building bridges. The venues and the promoter had decided. He respects Macklemore’s strength of purpose, but there is room for multiple approaches to peace. He chooses to use his platform as a place of safety and sanctuary, to keep conversations open rather than closed. His fans, he said, do not come to his shows expecting a political forum.
Within hours, the rest of his line-up was gone. Aaron Rowe went first, then Finneas, Lukas Graham and the band Beoga, who had been playing a six-song set with Sheeran every night.
Two of them reached for Irish history to explain themselves. Colonialism, famine, occupation. We are Irish people who understand these things, Beoga said. People who have been on the receiving end of an empire tend to recognise the machinery faster. It is not a superior moral instinct. It is just familiarity.
Here is the part worth sitting with. It was not Macklemore’s removal that emptied the tour. He was dropped on the 14th and the line-up held. What broke it was Sheeran’s explanation on the 15th. The defence of neutrality was the thing that made neutrality impossible for everyone else on the bill.
The Israeli-American Council, which essentially got what it wanted, then turned on Sheeran too. It is his stage, they said, his tour carries his name, and so the responsibility is his. On that single point they are right, and they are saying what Macklemore said in different words: there is no neutral position between the oppressor and the oppressed. When both sides find your neutrality contemptible, that is information.
On Wednesday, Macklemore said he would donate the entire $1 million he earned from those two nights to six organisations working in Gaza, and invited Robert Kraft to match it. Kraft representatives declined to comment. In the same post, Macklemore made a point of naming the organisers and activists who have paid real costs for standing with Palestine, noting that their risk is of an order far different to his own.
Three men were asked the same question this month. One paid $1m to answer it. One declined to comment. One called his stage a sanctuary. A sanctuary is defined by who is allowed inside it. So, who was this one for?
The writer is a journalist and conducts writing workshops in Karachi.
X: @LedeingLady
Published in Dawn, September 20th, 2026
