There Is No Palestine to 'Free'

Pro-Palestinian protesters descended on Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia over the weekend, waving flags and chanting "Free Palestine" outside Ed Sheeran's concert, one week after Macklemore got pulled from Sheeran's Loop Tour entirely. The rapper had used his opening slot at MetLife Stadium to push the same slogan from the stage, and according to Macklemore, Sheeran told him that Patriots owner Robert Kraft rallied other stadium owners behind an ultimatum: keep Macklemore on the bill, lose the venue. Sheeran, for his part, says the call wasn't his, calls the whole conflict "a human tragedy" on both sides, and has mostly tried to stay out of the blast radius.

I want to set the tour drama aside for a moment, because underneath the chanting and the flags is a premise nobody in that crowd seems to have actually examined: free Palestine from what, exactly, to become what, exactly?

There has never been a sovereign Palestinian state. Not once, not ever, not under any government, any constitution, any flag flying over internationally recognized borders. The land in question passed from the Ottoman Empire to the British Mandate to a 1947 partition plan the surrounding Arab nations rejected outright, choosing war instead. From 1948 to 1967, the West Bank sat under Jordanian control and Gaza under Egyptian control — not under Palestinian self-governance, and neither Jordan nor Egypt showed the slightest interest in creating one during those nineteen years when they held the exact territory activists now insist must be "freed." Today's Palestinian Authority holds observer status at the United Nations, not full member-state recognition, because full statehood has never actually existed to lose.

Contrast that with the land's other history, the one "Free Palestine" chants tend to skip past entirely. The United Kingdom of Israel under Saul, David, and Solomon. The divided Kingdom of Israel in the north and Kingdom of Judah in the south after that. The Hasmonean Kingdom, won back through actual armed revolt against a Greek empire trying to stamp out Jewish worship by force. And now the modern State of Israel, re-established in 1948 and internationally recognized within about 11 minutes of declaring independence. Four distinct eras of Jewish sovereignty stretching back 3,000 years, plus the modern state — five separate governments, on the same land, predating any Arab national claim to it by millennia. That's not propaganda. That's archaeology, ancient text, and a documentary record longer than most nations on earth can produce for their own founding.

So when Macklemore takes a stage and tells an arena full of young fans to "free Palestine," what is he actually asking for? Not the restoration of some erased nation, because that nation never existed in the first place. What he's really promoting, whether he understands it or not, is a relatively modern political identity, assembled largely out of a mixed Arab population that migrated into the region under Ottoman rule and during the economic growth of the British Mandate period — a real community, with real grievances worth discussing honestly, but not a "return" to anything. You cannot free a nation from captivity that it never held sovereign title to.

I understand the instinct in that crowd. Gaza's suffering is real, the civilian toll of this war is real, and nobody with a conscience should look at dead children on either side of that border and shrug. But it's worth being honest about who else is standing under that same banner. This isn't a slogan confined to people demanding statehood and nothing more. The NYU Law chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine drew national condemnation for a statement holding "the Israeli state" "wholly responsible" for October 7th, issued before Israel had even begun to respond.

SJP chapters at multiple universities circulated organizing materials describing the attack itself — the murders, the rapes, the kidnapped infants and grandparents — in the language of legitimate "resistance." Some of the loudest voices marching under the "Free Palestine" banner aren't asking for a state. They're excusing, or outright celebrating, the deliberate murder of Israeli civilians in their homes. That's not a fringe detail. It's a fact that belongs in the same conversation as the flags and the chanting, because a movement doesn't get to claim the moral high ground while some of its most visible members refuse to say October 7th was simply, plainly wrong.

But chanting a three-word slogan lifted from a T-shirt is not the same thing as understanding the history you're invoking, and an arena full of 20-somethings screaming "Free Palestine" at a British pop singer who had nothing to do with any of it isn't advancing peace. It's performing solidarity with a fiction, at the expense of an artist who, by every account, tried to stay neutral and still got dragged into a controversy that arguably isn't even his to resolve.

Macklemore is entitled to his opinions, and he's entitled to a stage, on his own tour, with his own name on the marquee. What he isn't entitled to is rewriting history for an audience that mostly doesn't know any better, then acting shocked when the venues and the artist actually bearing his name on the tour decide his politics have become the show. Robert Kraft understood something worth understanding: some causes are worth defending loudly, and some slogans deserve a harder look before you let them anywhere near your stage.

There's a real, complicated, human conflict happening in the Middle East, and it deserves serious people taking it seriously. "Free Palestine" isn't that. It's a bumper sticker standing in for a history lesson nobody in that crowd outside Lincoln Financial Field seems to have actually read.

Editor’s Note: Do you enjoy Townhall’s conservative reporting that takes on the radical Left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.

Join Townhall VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.