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........

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