Pink has ended a week of silence with a 1,088-word statement on Instagram, explaining why she reshared criticism of Macklemore’s “Free Palestine” set on Ed Sheeran’s stadium tour — and rejecting the conclusions much of the internet drew from it.
“I’ve been quiet in my own words for a week, which you know isn’t like me,” she wrote in the post, reproduced in full by Just Jared on Friday. “So here they are.”
What followed was part admission and part refusal. She conceded that her response to the backlash had been childish. She did not concede the underlying point.
How a repost became a week-long fight
The row began on the weekend of September 4 and 5, when Macklemore opened for Sheeran at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. During his set the rapper called out “Free Palestine, free Cuba, the Congo, Sudan, and Iran,” told the crowd he wanted people in Gaza to know they had not been forgotten, and performed his protest song “Hind’s Hall.” He repeated the remarks on the second night. Digital Music News reported that pro-Palestinian imagery appeared on the stadium screens during the performance.
Macklemore also addressed the Jewish members of the audience directly from the stage, saying that criticism of Israel “in no way is a criticism of you” and that his message was “for peace; love for all human beings to be treated with dignity, respect, and equality.” Days later he wrote on social media: “Wanting all humans to be treated equal should never be controversial.”
The Israeli American Council, which says it represents around 150,000 Israeli Americans, launched a petition demanding Macklemore be dropped from the remaining dates of Sheeran’s Loop tour. “This was an Ed Sheeran concert — not a political rally, not a protest, and not an activist event,” it reads, arguing that the question is “where the line should be drawn when an opening act uses a global concert platform to advance a one-sided political agenda.”
Pink entered the story by resharing a post from the @Stop_AntiSemitism account on her Instagram Story. That post accused Macklemore of spreading “anti-Israel propaganda” and said concertgoers were “owed apologies and refunds.” When the replies turned hostile, she posted a run of memes and quote graphics rather than a statement.
This is the point where accounts diverge, and the distinction matters. Several outlets, including Digital Music News and HELLO!, described the demand for refunds as Pink’s own words, reporting that she had called for apologies and money back. Newsweek and Just Jared both described it as a reshare to which she added nothing. Pink’s essay takes the second position, and makes it the hinge of her argument.
What Pink actually wrote
“Last Sunday I reposted somebody else’s post about Macklemore’s set at Ed Sheeran’s show,” she wrote. “It said things in words I didn’t write, and I wouldn’t have chosen all of them.” The memes that followed, she said, were her own doing: “That’s on me. A repost isn’t a statement, and a meme isn’t a spine.”
She then set out her position directly. “I was born a Jew. I didn’t pick it, and I’ve never hidden it,” she wrote, before restating a position she says she first gave in October 2023 — that Hamas is a terrorist organization, that “Palestinians deserve a future that honors their humanity and their aspirations,” that protecting innocent life “comes first, everywhere,” and that “nobody should ever celebrate the death of a child. Anybody’s child.” She referenced her decade as a UNICEF ambassador and said she had grieved children “on both sides of that fence.”
She declined to go further. “I’m not going to litigate a complex war in an Instagram caption, and I’m not going to recite anybody’s slogan to earn back a follower.”
Much of the essay is taken up with why Macklemore in particular provoked her. She recalls being in the room at the 2014 Grammys when he performed “Same Love” and 33 couples were married during the broadcast, and cheering. Months later, Macklemore appeared onstage in Seattle in a wig, false beard and large prosthetic nose, an outfit widely read as a Jewish caricature. He apologized at the time, saying the items were a random disguise and that a Jewish stereotype “never crossed my mind.” Pink writes that she let it go then, and that last weekend’s set brought it back.
Her objection, as she frames it, is not to the slogan. “I have never asked for another artist to be silenced and I’m not asking now. I don’t need anyone fired, and I don’t need a refund.” What she says she wants is to be able to say she was frightened without that being dismissed as propaganda.
She also pushes back on the label being thrown at her, writing that she does not believe most of the people in her comments hate Jews, but that “somebody handed them a story.” Her closing line on the subject: “But I’ve been portrayed as the villain before. I can take it.”
Where it stands now
Nothing has actually changed on the tour. Macklemore remains on the bill. Ed Sheeran has not publicly addressed the controversy, has not announced refunds, and has not said whether he intends to make any change to his support act. The IAC petition remains open against the tour’s remaining dates.
Pink, for her part, ended the essay somewhere other than the argument: with a note that Friday was both the 25th anniversary of September 11 and, at sundown, the start of Rosh Hashanah, and that she was going to make dinner for her children.
