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Feb 26, 2025 Web Exclusive By Jimi Arundell Photography by Jon Pountney

“Someone said, ‘It is the moral issue of our time.’ And I do agree with that,” says Patrick Jones, poet and political playwright. “Where else on Earth would it be allowed to happen? Really? This sort of blatant disregard of the other.” It’s a stark assessment of just how little value has been placed on Palestinian life during 75 years of Israeli occupation. The intense levels of dehumanizing scrutiny and oppression. And the grotesque number of war crimes committed in the name of Israeli defense since the start of the Israel-Gaza war on October 7, 2023.

Welsh wordsmith Jones has published numerous poetry books including Fuse/Fracture and My Bright Shadow. He has previously released the 1999 spoken word album Commemoration and Amnesia and collaborated with The Membranes’ bassist/singer and punk legend John Robb for 2019’s Renegade Psalms. In 2020, he teamed up with Manic Street Preachers’ singer/songwriter/guitarist James Dean Bradfield for the UK Top 10 LP Even in Exile, exploring the life, execution and legacy of Chilean communist activist and songwriter Victor Jara. He’s also the elder brother of the Manics’ lyricist/bassist Nicky Wire.

Now, Jones releases A Constellation of Sorrows via R*E*P*E*A*T Records. It’s a 13-track album combining poetry with a collage of music, samples and haunting soundscapes in support of the UNICEF Gaza appeal. It’s also based on his eyewitness account of recently visiting the West Bank. “It’s very indie DIY,” he beams with modest pride. “I was going to do it all myself on GarageBand and then talked to a few musicians and then Richard [Rose, from R*E*P*E*A*T] got on board and said, ‘Oh, let’s do a CD.’ Everyone just literally works for peanuts.”

It’s an ambitious project that blurs the lines between protest poetry, news reporting, and rock music. When asked if it was a very different process to writing a conventional book or straightforward poem, Jones responds: “I haven’t got to worry so much about ‘Is it a true poem as in spoken word?’ Because I think the delivery and the sort of message can be a little bit more direct. So, I’m obviously not going to do [T.S. Elliot’s] ‘The Waste Land,’ ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ [by Samuel Taylor Coleridge] type of thing, or a lot of poetry that I find just doesn’t touch me. I wanted to try and be direct.”

It’s unsettling to hear Jones explore the Palestinian apartheid and the sheer scale of the everyday discrimination and segregation the people face. Jones hopes that by immersing the listener, they will also experience a fraction of that horror. “And then they leave that experience and hopefully they’ve been challenged and maybe changed an opinion. Where they can ask questions and rage against it and say, ‘No, this is all wrong.’”

The record begins with “After Niemöller” riffing on the German pastor’s poignant anti-Nazi poem “First They Came.” It draws parallels with the divide-and-conquer techniques implemented by the Third Reich, how they dehumanized their chosen targets to justify their eradication. Jones recognizes this isn’t a direct repetition of history but there are still parallels. “There’s a huge debate about what the state of Israel is doing now. And obviously, one has to tread carefully, and I totally respect that,” he says. “But I also think you’ve got to be brave and what I’m seeing, I needed a way of trying to reflect that.

“Everyone was going, ‘Oh yes, but Israel has the right to [defend itself].’ It was always justifying to me, really horrific things. And right at the end, he ended the poem with ‘And then they came for me.’ I used a sample, which I really struggled to use, of Hind Rajab, the five-year-old Palestinian girl who was…. Oh, I mean, that, that, that phone call.”

Rajab and her family were fleeing Gaza City when their vehicle was hit by a shell, killing her aunt, uncle, and three cousins. She desperately called the Palestine Red Crescent Society for help with a surviving cousin whilst being attacked by an IDF tank. Her remaining relative was killed during the call, and she too was later found dead. It’s a horrific reminder of the terrible toll of an inevitable war following decades of subjugation, and the colossal human cost hidden behind the statistics. “Palestinian lives and deaths are just numbers. Eighteen thousand children and that’s just children that have been killed in [the Israel-Gaza war]. Part of me thinks it is the narrative that Israel has spun since 1948. What was that phrase? ‘A land without people for a people without a land.’ They said [that] about Palestine territory, but there were people there for a start and that was 76 years ago.”

Jones was invited to visit Palestine, unknowingly just before the outbreak of the war, by singer/songwriter Martyn Joseph of the Let Yourself Trust, a non-profit organization challenging international injustice. He spent 10 days meeting “real farmers and people on the street. Artisans, bakers, and blacksmiths, who were living and working under occupation.” And he saw the reality of the oppression and the contrast between the warm welcome he had received: “You would walk down the street, and you would see an 18-year-old Israeli, Israeli soldiers there with their rifles ready to go, just out of school. Gun towers everywhere and surveillance.”

He recounts his experiences in “The Heart is a Security Risk.” It details the occupying forces’ constant suspicions and attempts to restore the humanity of those he met by describing their lives and work. Palestinian names are removed, which the listener could assume had been a stylistic choice, emphasizing how redaction leads to eradication. Actually, Jones felt it a necessary precaution for their safety, revealing just how far-reaching the repression is. “I felt terrible about bleeping out these people because they were such wonderful hosts to us. But I balanced the idea of having their wonderful names and experiences juxtaposed [because] they could be arrested.”

After 15 months of a monstrously imbalanced war, a tentative ceasefire has now been declared. But Jones sees little hope in the immediate future: “My gut tells me that Israel is waiting for a tiny little failure. Because I think [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu wants to appease the right wing in his government…. I’m so glad there is a ceasefire, but I really don’t trust the state of Israel and Netanyahu and [Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich and that lot. I do think they want eradication. I think they want the Palestinians out.”

And despite the innumerable war crimes committed in the name of defense, the world still fails to hold the perpetrators to account or aid with the rebuilding. And the newly elected American President Donald Trump seems eager to assist in ethnic cleansing of the region, as the punk poet points out: “Just the words ‘cleaning out,’ again it does take us back to the language of the Holocaust. One group of people are better than the others.”

Former critics of the president, who will now avoid any criminal prosecutions having returned to office, have been quick to rescind any previous objections or raise any real criticism. This includes the UK’s Labour government, who appear quick to cower before the current administration on bended knee. “I yearn for a leader who will just speak up. Speak that truth and be brave [on] equality, justice, morality. Yeah, where are they? I don’t know,” Jones says, exasperated.

A Constellation of Sorrows responds to this lack of leadership and calls for a unified international grassroots resistance. It is a poignant reminder of our relationship with the oppressed people of Palestine and our responsibility to demand justice whenever human rights are so callously disregarded. As Jones summarizes: “What Israel is doing as a state is wrong. And it is right to speak about it. Maybe they can’t avoid the truth now. That’s my only hope.”

www.patrickjones3.bandcamp.com/album/a-constellation-of-sorrows

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