Britain’s most high-profile left-wing 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 Zionists, Zionism and its settler-colonial project in occupied Palestine i.e. “Israel”.

In defence of Zionists, Jones was a legacy media soldier and a full partner to the Zionist driven anti-semitism allegations aimed at former Labour Party politician Jeremy Corbyn's 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 “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. 

Secondly, it is profoundly ignorant, if not deceptive, because the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine predates the 1940s European Holocaust. The colonial document, the Balfour Declaration (named after then the racist, white supremacist British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour), literally paved the way for the European colonial-settlerism in Palestine was issued by the British Empire in 1917, long before there was a German Third Reich or even a European politician, called Adolf Hitler. The document committed the British Empire to “facilitate” the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

For an interpretation of the document, Jones could’ve turned to what his employer, The Guardian newspaper, editorialised upon the British government issuing the Declaration in November 1917. Its vaunted editor C.P. Scott wrote that Palestine “is not a country…But it will be a country; it will be the country of the Jews. That is the meaning of…” the Balfour Declaration. The fact that in 1917 the population of Palestine was 80,000 Jewish and 700,000 Arab Palestinian literally meant nothing to Scott (and hitherto meant nothing to Jones). Scott further jubilantly declared that the British government’s deliberate policy will then be “to encourage in every way in our power Jewish immigration…with a view to the ultimate establishment of a Jewish State.” Why Jones decides to overlook his own newspaper’s record on the founding of the colonisation of Palestine is a mystery. Scott lauded Zionist colonisation long before the Holocaust and so did another of Jones’s employers, the long running left-wing journal, New Statesman, which also came out in support of British imperialist engineered Zionist colonisation in Palestine. In November 1917, it editorialised, that the “present position of the Jews as unassimilated sojourners in every land but their own can never become satisfactory…”…” therefore, “It is far better…to make a nation of them” in Palestine.  

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To be fair to Jones, his omission of the British imperial role in Palestine is not unique to British analysis. Most commentary on Palestine, whether in support of the indigenous Palestinians or in support of Zionist colonial-settlers has always avoided, like a plague, the consequential period between 1917 and 1948 when the British imperialist occupation laid the foundations for the Zionist state. The unspoken standard procedure in British historical commentary on Palestine glibly and passingly mentions the Balfour Declaration then jumps to May 1948 (when Britain officially departed) therefore avoiding the consequential period of the British occupation of Palestine.

What is unique in Jones' rendering of the origins of the Zionist state, is that he omits even the mention of the Balfour Declaration and erroneously argues that the state’s origins lie in the aftermath of the European Holocaust. An implication of this is that those of us who oppose the creation of a state for refugee survivors of the Holocaust are on a moral par with those that committed the Holocaust in Europe. The idea that indigenous Palestinian population may have opposed a British managed colonial project from the get-go in 1917 is clearly oblivious to Jones.

However, to Jones’s credit, he seems to have made up for this omission during the Gaza genocide. In March 2024, five months into the genocide, a grassroots pro-Palestinian activist from the ‘Palestine Action’ pressure group defaced a portrait of Arthur Balfour displayed in Trinity College, University of Cambridge. This clearly seems to have prompted Jones to ‘discover’ the Balfour Declaration and he subsequently informed his followers on the X social media platform that, “Arthur Balfour is known for the 'Balfour Declaration', offering Palestine to the Zionist movement, while promising to "protect the rights" of non-Jews who made up over 90% of the population.” It’s a pity it took a grassroots activist, five months into a genocide, for Jones to acknowledge the existence of the Balfour Declaration and therefore indirectly admit the idea of a Jewish homeland predates the Holocaust.

As mentioned, how Britain laid the foundations for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine after issuing the Balfour Declaration is a subject that is rarely discussed by Britons. One academic who’s written on this subject is the historian Professor Rashid Khalidi. In December 2024, Jones shared an X post clip of Khalidi belittling the now deposed Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad and the Iranian contribution to resistance against Britain’s Zionist colonial-settler project.

Although Hamas, Hezbollah and other Palestinian and Lebanese resistance factions have always expressed appreciation for Iran’s support, Khalidi is dismissive and cynical. Yet Khalidi has also written on Britain’s military role in crushing the indigenous population to pave the way for the creation of “Israel”. In a Guardian article, Khalidi argues that the Zionist colonial entity’s genocidal doctrine was taught to it by British imperialists. He argues that the doctrine “is in fact derived from the aggressive approach first taught to the founders of Israel’s armed forces – officers such as Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Sadeh, chosen members of the Haganah and Palmach militias who were trained in the late 1930s by veteran British colonial counter-insurgency experts.

The doctrine holds that by attacking pre-emptively or in a retaliatory fashion with overwhelming force, and by striking directly at civilian populations considered supportive of insurgents, the enemy can be decisively defeated, permanently intimidated, and forced to accept the terms of the coloniser.” One could logically and morally argue that the current genocide in Gaza has its roots in the implementation of the Balfour Declaration by Britain’s imperial forces in the 1920s and 1930s. By the early mid-1940s, Britain had taught its Zionist colonial-settler proteges all it could and it was time to leave. It is this evil colonial doctrine that brought “Israel” into existence and not the European white man’s grandiose “incontestable need for a Jewish homeland” in the aftermath of their European holocaust. 

Nevertheless, Jones should be commended for nobly and humbly acknowledging the colonial ‘Balfour Declaration’ a mere 106 years after the Empire issued it. Let’s hope it doesn’t take this multi-generational duration for him to acknowledge the central military and colonial role played by British imperial forces in laying the foundations for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in the 1930s – but there’s only just under 5 years before we reach this centenary.