I used similar functionality to this in a recent project. To allow the pinch to zoom functionality to work you just need to make sure you correctly specify the values in the viewport tag eg.
<meta name=viewport content="width=device-width,user-scalable=yes,initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=2.0"/>
The most important values are the user-scalable=yes and also the maximum scale since this must be greater than 1.0 to allow for zooming.
You can find more information on viewport here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mobile/Viewport_meta_tag
For the swipe events you can bind the swipeleft and swiperight events to a .on() function in jQuery Mobile.
Here is an example of what your code should look like:
$('#yourElement').on('swipeleft swiperight', function (event) {
//swiped to the left
if (event.type == "swipeleft") {
//do something
}
//swiped to the right
if (event.type == "swiperight") {
//do something
}
});
For more info on jQuery Mobile events you can check out this link (or the link m_gol provided above since they are basically the same):
http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.1.1/docs/api/events.html
Using both sets of code above, you will be able to detect swipe events as well as pinch to zoom the page.