Ed Sheeran Owes His Fans an Apology

Ed Sheeran Owes His Fans an Apology

Rabbi Menachem Creditor

September 6, 2026

At MetLife Stadium this past weekend, Benjamin Hammond Haggerty, otherwise known as Macklemore, did not merely perform as one of Ed Sheeran’s opening acts. He used a vast stage, in front of tens of thousands of people gathered for Sheeran’s concert, to lead chants of “Free Palestine,” perform “Hind’s Hall,” and project graphic images from Gaza and pro-Palestinian demonstrations across the screens. Jewish and Israeli attendees did not purchase tickets for a political rally against Israel. They came to hear music. Instead, many were blindsided by a spectacle that made their presence feel unwelcome and their grief irrelevant. Reporting on the event makes clear how deliberate and public the moment was.

Ed Sheeran cannot plausibly treat this as someone else’s problem.

Macklemore was on Sheeran’s tour and on Sheeran’s stage. His performance was not an unscripted remark in a hallway or an aside at a private gathering. It was a centerpiece of a professionally produced stadium set, with visual accompaniment, microphones, screens, lighting, and the authority granted by an international superstar’s platform. Whatever Sheeran personally believes about Israel, Gaza, or the war, allowing this performance to occur without public correction amounts to implicit endorsement.

And he could not reasonably have been unaware of what was unfolding. The screens were enormous. The crowd response was audible. The political content was the point of the set. A headliner who profits from an arena-scale production also bears responsibility for what that production communicates to the people who bought tickets.

There is a painful irony here. Sheeran’s own work has repeatedly appealed to tenderness and emotional responsibility. In “Be Kind,” which he co-wrote, he sings, “I don’t wanna see you cry,” because “people can be so cold.” Those are simple words, but they name something morally serious: our actions have consequences for other human beings, and decency requires attention to the pain we might cause.

That standard should apply here.

Macklemore’s activism has long moved beyond a general concern for Palestinian civilians, whose suffering is real and whose dignity matters. He has made Israel into a singular moral villain, mobilizing audiences with rhetoric and imagery that erase Israeli grief, Jewish trauma, Hamas’s brutality, and the actual complexity of a devastating war. To invite that message into a concert without warning, especially in the New York area, where so many Jews have deep family, communal, and personal ties to Israel, was reckless.

It is also worth saying plainly that criticism of an Israeli government is not the same thing as creating a public atmosphere in which Jewish concertgoers are asked to absorb mass political hostility toward the Jewish state as the price of enjoying an evening of music. Jewish safety and belonging are not conditional on silence about Israel. Nor is concern for Palestinian life strengthened by treating Jewish attachment to Israel as something inherently shameful or disposable.

Sheeran has built a career on songs that ask listeners to care for one another across heartbreak, loneliness, and loss. But care cannot remain merely lyrical. It has to show up in judgment, in accountability, and in the willingness to recognize when one’s platform has caused harm.

He should apologize to the fans who felt ambushed at MetLife Stadium. He should acknowledge that Macklemore’s set crossed a line from artistic expression into political agitation on a stage that Sheeran controlled. And he should make clear that future audiences will not be placed in the same position.

“I don’t wanna see you cry” is a beautiful sentiment. Now it is time for Ed Sheeran to live up to it.