On political shapeshifting
Owen Jones and the convenient erasure of complicity
This week, The Guardian’s Owen Jones posted a video rebuking fellow journalists for remaining silent on Israel’s killing of Palestinian journalists:
‘You disgust me’, he scolds, ‘shame on you, and shame on you forever. You’ll never be forgiven. This will haunt you for the rest of your life. And we will hold you to account as well’.
For years, however, Jones has walked in lock-step with the Zionist lobby.
In his 2020 title This Land: The Story of a Movement, Jones regurgitates Zionist apologia for the Nakba, claiming that there was ‘an incontestable need’ for the colonisation of Palestine and arguing nonsensically that Zionism (a paradigmatic European colonial project) is ‘fundamentally different from those projects of European colonialism’ such as in Algeria.
Writer, historian and Ebb Magazine editor Louis Allday describes Jones’ book as ‘ahistorical, offensive, dishonest nonsense that crudely parrots every liberal-Zionist talking point there is’.
Jones also played a significant role in fabricating the ‘antisemitism crisis’ used to purge Jeremy Corbyn and other pro-Palestinian voices from the UK Labour party. Notably, Jones was headline speaker at a 2017 ‘Jewish Labour Movement’ event, a pro-Zionist, anti-Corbyn organisation with close ties to the Israeli embassy. As The Electronic Intifada reports:
Jones was star of the show at [the] event at which he opined on ‘left antisemitism’ and called for the expulsion of Black Jewish anti-Zionist Jackie Walker from Labour. He would not get his way for two more years.
In a 2025 tweet, Palestine Declassified’s David Miller wrote:
Owen Jones is a deceitful propagandist with a long and unprincipled record of pushing imperialist messages. This was evident when he surrounded himself with self-professed ‘Zionist shitlords’ … during the ‘Labour antisemitism’ smears, and parroted Zionist state propaganda against leftists in the Labour party.
For years, Jones also publicly opposed BDS, and even criticised the boycott movement in a cosy interview with Zionist propaganda rag The Jewish Chronicle.
The Electronic Intifada has reported on Jones’ role as a willing and useful Zionist tool. In particular, I recommend the following EI articles, with my particular thanks to the journalism of Asa Winstanley:
How the Israel Lobby is using Owen Jones, 2017
How Owen Jones learned to stop worrying and love Zionism, 2022
Why is Owen Jones defending a Nazi collaborator, 2021
How Owen Jones justifies Labour’s purge of socialists, 2021
Infamously, Owen Jones has a long history of blocking his many Palestinian critics on social media. And yes, as is so often the case, there’s a Refaat Alareer tweet for that:
Unsurprisingly, Jones continues to qualify his supposed support for Palestine with a condemnation of Palestinian resistance.
Noting how widely Jones’ video this week was shared and applauded, I posted a few Instagram stories describing Jones’ own history of Zionist stenography. On this basis, I asked people to reconsider their unqualified praise. I received an unexpected and unprecedented number of DMs, arguing either that:
(a) people should be allowed to ‘change their views’, or
(b) there are bigger fish to fry than Owen Jones
I’ll respond:
(a) Thanks to the courage and steadfastness of Palestinian and regional armed resistance, and of Palestinian journalism, Zionism is on its death bed. Sooner or later, even the most despicable propagandists will 'change their views' and claim that they were always opposed to the colonisation of Palestine. Western media figures will attempt to erase their decades-long role in providing cover for genocide. We are already seeing the first murmurs of this inevitability.
If Jones was genuine, he would apologise. He would feel nothing in this moment but humility, shame and horror as he reflects upon his own role as a slippery Zionist hack. He certainly wouldn't exploit his 'new perspective' to re-centre himself or attempt to enlarge his platform with such unearned moral superiority.
(b) Western imperialist media is directly responsible for the genocide. Liberal Zionist media figures like Jones are not peripheral, they have been particular and essential components of the Zionist death machine. Like Zionist politicians and soldiers, they have Palestinian blood on their hands, and they don't deserve a free pass.
There can be no reckoning with the evils of Zionism that does not include its stenographers, propagandists or, as Césaire would describe them, functionaries necessary ‘for the smooth operation of business’1.
Of course each of these functionaries will arrive upon the ‘right side of history’ once the damage of their wilful complicity has been done; once opposing Zionism becomes a career-making, rather than breaking, political costume.
We have the receipts and it’s our moral obligation to use them.
The convenient erasure of complicity, as so transparently performed by Owen Jones in the UK, is also occurring in Australian arts, media and publishing.
Left-coded news platforms are already quietly nudging their Zionist editorial parameters to accomodate the possibility of Israeli criminality, without so much as pausing to rinse the blood from their own hands.
‘Progressive’ organisations and publications are now positioning themselves at the supposed vanguard of Palestinian solidarity, without acknowledging their recent condemnation of Palestinian resistance and regurgitation of Zionist atrocity propaganda, or their Zionist funding and infiltration, or their quiet erasure of martyrdom, or their credulous hyping of fake ‘antisemitism’ crises, or their previous (if not ongoing) acts of censorship.
Publishers, writers’ festivals, and literary awards are gradually accommodating a new market for the cultural production of liberation — so brave! — without acknowledging their own recent histories of Zionist complicity and capitulation.
When we criticise those who quietly ‘change their views’ we are accused of compromising progressive ‘cohesion’ or sabotaging the mythical ‘building of a movement’.
We are warned that, if we don’t shut up, the ‘left will eat itself’.
Well if this is the left, the left can go ahead and eat itself. A ‘change of views’, when that change concerns one’s views on genocide, must be undertaken, at bare minimum, with honesty, humility, accountability and comprehensive amends.
Meanwhile, lets build a genuinely revolutionary and principled movement that refuses to accommodate unrepentant, opportunistic, shape-shifting careerism and convenience.
I look around and wherever there are [colonisers] I see force, brutality, cruelty, sadism, conflict, and, in a parody of education, the hasty manufacture of a few thousand subordinate functionaries … artisans, office clerks, and interpreters necessary for the smooth operation of business.
—Aimé Césaire, Discourse on colonialism, 1950