Macklemore Donating $1M In Ed Sheeran Tour Proceeds To Organizations For Palestine

On Monday (Sept. 14), Macklemore was dropped from Ed Sheeran's The Loop Tour due to his advocacy for Palestine. Sheeran made a statement, saying he's "not complicit" and it was the promoter's decision to remove Macklemore. His other openers and backing band then quit the tour in solidarity with Palestinian people. Now, Macklemore shared another statement, announcing that he's donating $1 million he made from Ed Sheeran's The Loop Tour to organizations for Palestine.

"With everything that has happened over the last 48 hours, I want to bring the conversation back to where it belongs: to the Palestinian people who are still being killed, still living under military occupation, and still fighting for their freedom," the statement begins. It continues:

I will be donating the entire $1 million of my net earnings from Ed Sheeran's Loop Tour to six organizations working directly to support the Palestinian people. And I invite Robert Kraft to match my donation. Whatever we disagree about, perhaps we can agree on this: Palestinian lives are worth protecting. A Palestinian life is no less valuable than any other life on this earth.

That is what this has always been about. Not me. Not a tour. Not the headlines or the controversy. It is about Palestinians right to freedom, dignity and safety in their own homeland.

I want to center the parents carrying their children into hospitals without the basic resources to treat them, and the physicians, paramedics, journalists and aid workers who keep going back in. I want to center the organizers and activists who have paid real costs for standing with Palestine. Their risk is of a far different order than mine.

Just yesterday, 15 year old Muhammad al Zinati was killed in an Israeli strike while rushing to help aid worker Sherif Lubbad, who had already been injured. He was a child. Both were murdered. Both should be alive.

And the ones still under the rubble, whose names exist only in the memories of people who may not have survived to speak them.

Writing a check is one of the least costly forms of solidarity available to me. I am doing it because I can, and because these organizations are doing the work while much of the world debates it.

But aid alone cannot address the conditions that make it necessary. This is a manmade injustice, and I believe it requires immediate political change.
Palestinians have lived for decades without basic rights and should not have to wait another day to be free.

That is where my focus will remain. I will continue to stand with the Palestinian people and their fight for liberation.

When the news cycle moves on, which it will, don't move with it.

Free Palestine.

UPDATE: Kraft says he is donating $2 million, matching a donation by Sheeran.