Owen Jones discovers the 1917 Balfour Declaration!

Britain’s most high-profile left-wing, woke British journalist and up until recently Labour Party’s leading advocate, Owen Jones has certainly surprised many with his welcome uncompromising opposition to the Zionist genocide in Gaza, Palestine. With over a million followers on X/Twitter and a YouTube channel with over seven hundred thousand subscribers he has gallantly given a much needed prominent social-media platform to anti-genocide voices. Yet before the genocide, Jones was known to defend of Zionists, Zionism and its settler-colonial project in occupied Palestine i.e “Israel”.

In defence of Zionists, Jones was a legacy media soldier and full a partner to the Zionist driven anti-semitism allegations aimed at former Labour Party politician Jermey Corbyn supporters during the latter’s leadership tenure between 2015-2020. Every time the establishment media beat the drum of an anti-semitic allegation Jones more often than not was at hand to give credibility to the false accusatory fanfare. Jones endorsed the suspension of former Labour Party Member of Parliament, Chris Williamson, as “deserved” for supposedly “repeatedly causing offense” to Zionists (or “Jewish people” as Jones launders them). Black-Jewish activists Jackie Walker was another on the receiving end of Jones’s political campaigning when she raised the taboo subject of some Jewish involvement in the trans-atlantic slave trade, a field that is beyond the pale in British learned society. In a speech at a Zionist conference, Jones had demanded her expulsion and continues to harbour disdain for her to this day.

On Zionism, Jones has endorsed one of the most enduring hegemonic Western myths about why the state of “Israel” was established. In his book, This Land: The Struggle for the Left, about the Corbyn leadership years he writes that after the Holocaust in Europe, “there appeared to be an incontestable need for a Jewish homeland…” Arrogantly, he doesn’t explain why specifically Palestine should be handed over to European Jewish refugees. He then states, “Israel” is simply a country “founded in part by Holocaust survivors”. As such it is different to other “European settler-colonialism[s]”. He elaborates the difference further, “…Israel’s founders were fleeing the flags of their old nations. Rhodesia, for example, was not founded by survivors of a genocide who had already suffered two millennia of persecution.” This is both a racist narrative and ignorant because in Jones’s rendering of the creation of the Zionist colonial entity, Palestinians do not exist.

Firstly, it’s a racist narrative because it implies it is legitimate for Europeans fleeing pogroms and persecution to lay claim to land in West Asia over the heads of the indigenous population without any consultation. In a two page discussion in his book on the creation of “Israel”, the indigenous Palestinian voice is mercilessly absent. The notion of Palestinians as the indigenous population does not even exist in Jones’s retelling of “Israel’s” creation.