Key Takeaways:
- Macklemore pledged roughly $1 million to Palestinian aid groups following his removal from Ed Sheeran’s tour.
- UNRWA, MAP, PCRF and Anera have faced allegations or controversies involving antisemitism, Hamas or other extremist groups.
- The donations add to Macklemore’s longer record of controversies involving Jews and Israel.
In May 2014, American rapper Macklemore walked onto a stage in Seattle wearing a large hooked prosthetic nose, a black beard and a dark wig. He said afterward that it was a “random costume” designed to let him move through the crowd unnoticed. Seth Rogen put it plainly: if you asked someone to assemble an antisemitic Jew costume, “they’d have that exact shopping list.”
Macklemore apologized. He said a “Jewish stereotype” never crossed his mind. The ADL accepted the apology and called the whole affair a tempest in a teapot. Twelve years on, it is clear that the ADL was too generous.
Maybe the guy who once said a “Jewish stereotype” never crossed his mind while dressed as one of the most recognizable antisemitic caricatures imaginable isn’t the authority on what Jew hatred looks like. pic.twitter.com/UxuGPLcGrS
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) September 19, 2026
A Million Dollars
On September 4, 2026, opening for Ed Sheeran at MetLife Stadium, Macklemore told the crowd “Free Palestine” and then addressed “all of my Jewish brothers and sisters” directly: “criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide, it in no way is criticism of you.” Macklemore tells Jews that his words have nothing to do with them while describing the Jewish state through anti-Jewish accusations of apartheid and genocide, claims that do not criticize an Israeli government or policy but cast Jewish self-determination itself as an inherently racist and murderous project.
Robert Kraft, whose company owns Gillette Stadium, declined to host him for the Boston date, citing his “recent comments and a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery.” He was subsequently removed from the tour after multiple venues refused to host him; Sheeran later said on Instagram that the decision was the promoter’s, not his.
Macklemore’s response was to announce that his net earnings from the tour, roughly a million dollars, would go to six Palestinian aid groups. Four have been named: UNRWA, Medical Aid for Palestinians, the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and Anera. Ms. Rachel followed with a million of her own. PBS ran the story under a headline about relief and attention for “ongoing suffering.”
Let’s be clear here. A man with Macklemore’s record has chosen, publicly and by name, to route his money through organizations whose problems with Jews and with terror are a matter of public record. He chose these groups. He named them. He can have the scrutiny that comes with it. And the first name on the list tells you the most.
UNRWA
Macklemore’s relationship with UNRWA predates this month. In 2024, he pledged the royalties from “Hind’s Hall,” his song accusing Israel of genocide and apartheid, to the agency. According to the head of UNRWA USA, those royalties have now passed $509,000.
Start with October 7th. In August 2024, the UN’s own oversight office completed its investigation into nineteen UNRWA employees accused of taking part in the massacre. In nine cases, it concluded the evidence, “if authenticated and corroborated,” could indicate they “may have been involved,” and terminated their contracts. The IDF has released recordings it attributes to UNRWA teachers on the day itself; one, in Deir al-Balah, is heard saying: “We have female hostages, I captured one!” A released hostage told Channel 13 he was held for nearly fifty days in the attic of a UNRWA schoolteacher. Emily Damari has said she was held in a UNRWA school. In February 2024, the IDF uncovered a Hamas intelligence tunnel, with servers and living quarters, directly beneath UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters. Philippe Lazzarini, the agency’s head, said UNRWA “did not know what is under its headquarters.” Israel’s response was that a tunnel of that size would take more than four months to dig.
Israel’s claim is that more than two thousand UNRWA staff belong to Hamas or Islamic Jihad. This June, UNRWA dismissed a further 70 Gaza employees Israel had named, while insisting the dismissals were “not part of a disciplinary process” and validated nothing. Seventy-nine people gone from the payroll over Hamas, and the agency maintains it has found no problem.
Then there is what UNRWA is for. In 1948, around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs left their homes during the War of Independence. Today UNRWA counts 5.9 million refugees. The number went up because UNRWA’s definition, as UNHCR itself describes it, confers refugee status on descendants through the male line, and because that status survives even if a person holds citizenship elsewhere. UNHCR, which handles every other refugee on earth, exists to bring refugee status to an end; a new citizenship ends it. UNRWA has no such mandate. A grandson born in Amman with a Jordanian passport is a “Palestine refugee” on its books, and will be until he dies. The effect, three generations on, is that the “return” of millions to Israel remains a live demand, maintained by an agency that would cease to exist the day it was resolved. That is not a refugee program. It is the preservation of a claim against the Jewish state.
UNRWA also runs the schools. Over half a million children learn in its classrooms, and it teaches the Palestinian Authority curriculum. The EU, which pays for much of that curriculum, commissioned its own review in 2021, written to be as gentle as possible, and even so it found “antisemitic content” in the books. IMPACT-se, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education’s reading of the same texts is less gentle: fifth-grade Islamic education holding up “Jihad for Allah” as among the “prime instances of bravery,” Dalal Mughrabi, who led the 1978 Coastal Road massacre of 38 civilians, presented as “a role model,” Israel absent from every map. On April 11, 2024, the European Parliament condemned the “hateful contents encouraging violence, spreading antisemitism and inciting hatred” in those books, named “supplementary educational materials developed by UNRWA staff” specifically, and said that “education to hatred has direct and dramatic consequences on the security of Israelis.” That is the European Union, six months after October 7, drawing a line from the classroom to the massacre.
The supplementary materials are UNRWA’s own, and it cannot blame Ramallah for them. In January 2021, IMPACT-se found that self-learning packs written and branded by UNRWA, sent to some 300,000 children during the pandemic, taught that “the Palestinians sacrifice their blood to liberate Jerusalem,” described Jews as inherently treacherous, and celebrated killing Israelis as a “hobby.” Lazzarini admitted it: the material “was mistakenly included.” It was removed from the website. In 2022 IMPACT-se found it still in the classrooms, and in November 2023 documented 300 additional pages of it, bearing UNRWA logos and staff names. UNRWA’s stated policy is zero tolerance. The evidence is that its tolerance is close to total.
Then the teachers. UN Watch’s March 2023 report found 47 fresh cases of incitement by UNRWA staff, among them an employee who posted a photograph of Hitler urging him to “wake up because there are still some people you need to burn.” In January 2024, it exposed a Telegram group of some 3,000 UNRWA teachers in Gaza celebrating October 7 and praising the killers as “heroes.” This is not a few rogue accounts. UN Watch has documented how Hamas took the UNRWA teachers’ unions themselves: in 2011 the Gaza union, led by a Hamas official, fought and beat a plan by UNRWA’s own management to introduce Holocaust education in its schools. In Lebanon, the head of UNRWA’s teachers’ union, Fateh Sharif, was a senior Hamas commander; UNRWA suspended him in March 2024, and he was still on its books when Israel killed him that September. In November 2024, IMPACT-se named five Gaza schools whose principals, based on IDF intelligence, are Hamas operatives.
And the buildings. In May 2024, Israeli troops searching a UNRWA school complex in Rafah found firearms, grenades and Hamas uniforms in the classrooms and tunnel shafts beneath them; a bomb in one shaft killed three soldiers. The agency’s answer, each time, is that it did not know.
These are the schools where Palestinian children learn who the Jew is. Macklemore’s royalties help pay for them.
The Others: MAP, PCRF and Anera
Medical Aid for Palestinians is a British charity. In 2014 Dr. Swee Ang, its founder, who remains an honorary patron, circulated a video by David Duke, the former Klan leader, titled “CNN Goldman Sachs & the Zio Matrix,” with the note: “This is shocking video please watch. This is not about Palestine – it is about all of us! SEE THIS VIDEO BEFORE IT IS REMOVED FROM CIRCULATION.” The video was about Jewish control of media, banking and politics. Confronted by the Telegraph, she said she had not known who Duke was, and then added: “I am concerned that if there is any truth in the video, that Jews control the media, politics and banking… I was worried.”
The institution around her has drawn scrutiny of its own. In June 2018, UK Lawyers for Israel and the Lawfare Project filed a seventeen-page complaint with the Charity Commission alleging that MAP promoted “racial hatred of Israelis and Jews,” maintained links to affiliates of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and spent charitable funds on political propaganda. MAP called it an “appalling smear” and “part of a wider pattern of attacks on legitimate NGOs.” The Commission opened no inquiry. When it closed the case in November 2018, it pointed MAP’s trustees to its regulatory guidance on the issues raised, and said that if further complaints arrived it might have to re-engage. This is a regulator declining to act while keeping the file open. NGO Monitor reports that between 2019 and 2021 MAP granted $300,000 to the Abdel Shafi Community Health Association in Gaza, an organization it describes as founded and directed by senior PFLP members, and that MAP’s own 2014 Gaza relief partners list included the Hamas-run Ministry of Health. Most seriously, NGO Monitor cites an internal Hamas government memo from December 2022 describing MAP’s administrative director in Gaza as “affiliated with Hamas,” someone who “has pledged allegiance to its rule” and works in what the memo calls “the positive,” the regime’s own euphemism for the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. MAP’s answer is that it has never had a role called “administrative director,” that its own checks found no member of any armed group in its ranks, and that NGO Monitor has a record of “misleading or baseless claims.” Perhaps. But the memo, if it is what it appears to be, was not written by NGO Monitor. It was written by Hamas, about a man Hamas regarded as its own, and it named MAP.
The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund is the charity Ms. Rachel chose. Its history with Hamas-linked money goes back a long way. NGO Monitor records that in 2004 the Holy Land Foundation, whose assets the US government had frozen three years earlier over its funding of Hamas and whose leaders were later convicted of material support for terror, attempted to route a $50,000 donation to PCRF, and that the two organizations had earlier staged joint fundraising with a share of proceeds going to PCRF. In 2019, PCRF partnered with the Hamas-run Ministry of Health to open a pediatric cancer department at Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital in Gaza City. In November 2023, the IDF took journalists into Rantisi’s basement and showed them what it said was Hamas infrastructure, including weapons and evidence that hostages had been held there. PCRF’s cancer ward was upstairs. Hamas ministry documents recovered in the war list PCRF as a donor to a Deir al-Balah association with Hamas-affiliated board members.
According to NGO Monitor, Ashraf Abu Issa, a PCRF board member as of February 2025, shared a video on October 7 itself, while the killing was still underway, promoting “the liberation of Palestine, all of it, from the river to the sea.” Five weeks later, he posted that “history did not start on 7th of October.” The organization’s Hebron area coordinator, Amal Al-Haimoni, changed her profile picture that month to an image of a figure marked with a Star of David eating a Palestinian child. If the report is accurate, that is the blood libel. Not a metaphor for the blood libel. The thing itself, on the account of a staff member of a children’s charity. In November 2023, PCRF’s Tampa chapter held a fundraiser featuring Hatem Fariz, who in 2006 pleaded guilty to providing services to Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And the founder, Steve Sosebee, tweeted on October 28, 2023, three weeks after the massacre, that “Biden supports genocide.” PCRF’s public position is that it is a non-political medical charity. We have found no response from it to the allegations regarding Abu Issa, Al-Haimoni or the Fariz event. It should be asked for one.
Anera, the Washington-based group, is the most consequential of the three because it is the most American. Its own tax returns show roughly $100 million in U.S. government funding between 2009 and 2022; federal records put USAID’s total since 2008 at over $168 million. Its president, Sean Carroll, was chief of staff and chief operating officer at USAID under President Obama.
The Forum’s investigation, published in 2024, named names. Mousa Shawwa, a Gaza logistics coordinator, endorsed a social media call to “erase the Jews.” Naser Qadous, the agricultural programs manager, shared Hamas material describing an Israeli hostage as a “guest.” Mohamed Alsayed, a former national coordinator in Lebanon, called October 7 a “beautiful morning.” Ibrahim Najjar, a Gaza project coordinator, posted images venerating Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas. Another staff member expressed delight at an injury to “the head of a rotten Jew.” The Forum sent Anera its findings and reported: “We received no response.” When it had earlier put questions about a Gaza partner, the Unlimited Friends Association, whose director had called for al-Aqsa to be “cleansed from the impurity of the Jews,” Anera’s spokesman said the charity follows “the highest standards in vetting all of our partners” and had received USAID’s clearance, then said that any suggestion Anera funds terrorists would “ensure contact from our lawyers.”
Anera’s institutional history points the same way. As far back as 2005, it raised $900,000 for a single project at the Islamic University of Gaza, founded by Yassin and described by Israel as a Hamas stronghold, and in 2007 USAID’s own Inspector General concluded the agency had “seriously failed” in its vetting duties for Anera’s work there. Its long-standing Gaza partner, the Bayader Association, records in its annual reports its “coordination” and “meetings” with Hamas ministries, and, in February 2023, co-organized a ceremony in Khan Yunis attended by senior Hamas officials including Abdul Salam Haniyeh, son of Ismail Haniyeh. Anera says it maintains a strict “no-contact” policy with Hamas. To be fair to Anera, the Hamas records recovered in the war cut both ways: one 2021 intelligence document says a former employee “used to work as an intelligence source” for the Interior Ministry, while others describe Anera as “not cooperating” with Hamas and resisting its financial inspections. Both things can be true of a large organization. Neither is reassuring.
Objection
Macklemore is not a passive donor. He is someone who has spent years making Palestine the center of his public identity, who wrote songs about it, who stood on a stage at a Seattle benefit and said “Fuck America” over its support for Israel, and who has now built a media event around exactly where his money goes. The nine UNRWA dismissals were reported worldwide in August 2024. He knew, and he gave anyway.
Macklemore’s defenders say the nose was an accident, the “Fuck America” was a slip, the apartheid line was addressed to Jews with love, and the million dollars is for the children. Each explanation on its own is possible. Together they describe a man who keeps arriving, by one route or another, at the Jew.
Kraft said his stadium does not provide a platform for hate speech. He was right to say it, and he was right about the man. The money will be spent. The applause will fade. The record stays.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
