David Hirst, who has died aged 89 of cancer, was the Guardian’s authoritative correspondent through four decades of dramatic change across the Middle East. From the Arab-Israeli six-day war of 1967 to the doomed return of the Palestinian leadership to Gaza in 1994, Hirst’s profound and fearless articles were the trusted key to understanding the region’s turmoil.
His history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, caused a storm when it was published in 1977 (updates followed in 1984 and 2003). The US journal the New Republic called it “the most malignantly anti-Israeli book ever to be published in English by someone who claims to be a serious commentator”. This would have come as no surprise to senior Guardian editors, who were routinely admonished by Israeli embassy officials for what they considered Hirst’s biased coverage.
Hirst’s dispassionate reporting saw him barred periodically from entering Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq after unsparingly critical coverage of their regimes. He was among the few journalists to report from the Syrian city of Hama in the aftermath of the 1982 gas attack launched by the army of President Hafez al-Assad on his own citizens, which left thousands dead. In his report, Hirst noted “the depth of the crisis in the existing Arab order, and, for Syria specifically, the bankruptcy of the ruling Ba’ath party and its self-appointed mission of bringing ‘unity, freedom and socialism’ to a divided and backward Arab nation”.
The Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat similarly received a withering report card in 2001 when Hirst wrote of “his notorious egotism” and his whole career being one of “ever-growing moderation”. In a classic Hirst long sentence untouchable by any Guardian subeditor, he summed up Arafat’s way of operating: “his obsessive desire for personal control and domination, his interference in the minutest details of administration, his deviousness and whimsy, his preference for loyalty over competence, his readiness, though entirely uninterested in wealth and luxury himself, to exploit through patronage and corruption, the weaknesses of those around him, who are”. He went on to say that the leader played “the collaborator’s role that the Oslo Accords requires of him”. His description of Arafat’s virtues was equally precise: “physical courage in the face of mortal danger, dedication and indefatigablity, working to 4am”.
On the day of the execution of another Arab leader in 2006, Hirst was also unsparing: “The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who was executed this morning at the age of 69, may not yield many general biographies – he was personally too uninteresting for that – but he will be a case study for political scientists for years to come. For he was the model of a certain type of developing world despot, who was, for over three decades, as successful in his main ambition, which was taking and keeping total power, as he was destructive in exercising it.
“Yet at the same time, he was commonplace and derivative.
“Stalin was his exemplar. The likeness came from more than conscious emulation: he already resembled him in origin, temperament and method. Like him, he was unique less in kind than in degree, in the extraordinary extent to which, if the more squalid forms of human villainy are the sine qua non of the successful tyrant, he embodied them.”
His serious and quite academic approach to journalism extended to his attitude towards deadlines. Paul Webster, later to become editor of the Observer, recalls being told by the then Guardian foreign editor, Martin Woollacott, to commission a substantial profile of one of the protagonists in the 1980s Iran-Iraq war. “Nervous of his reputation as a difficult correspondent to deal with, I tentatively suggested the idea, and after a slightly chilly exchange he agreed and asked what the deadline was.
“‘Thursday,’ I replied. There was a long silence. ‘Which Thursday,’ he finally replied icily. ‘This Thursday.’ There was a long silence, then the phone exploded. ‘How can I write a serious piece of work about a hugely important man in THREE DAYS?’ he demanded furiously. ‘That’s preposterous.’ The profile duly appeared, three weeks later.”
The former BBC Middle East correspondent Jim Muir remembered first meeting him in Beirut after years of keenly reading his articles. “I imagined him at least eight feet tall with flaming red hair and blazing eyes, but here was this diffident, shy little man. I could not believe it. However, I soon learned that David could make a roomful of boisterous hacks fall silent as he quietly expounded his thoughts. His words had such unmistakable weight and authority. He was entirely without hubris, but he did jokingly relish that other titan of Middle East journalism, Robert Fisk, once paying tribute to ‘David’s brilliant analytical mind’.”
By the 80s Hirst and Muir were fast friends, and Muir stayed at Hirst’s seafront flat in Ain al- Mreisseh, on the Corniche in Beirut, for months on end, including during the 1982 Israeli siege of the city. “His mind on higher things, David was capable of walking around in shoes with holes in their soles until his wife, Amina, came on the scene and reform set in.” Amina was a social anthropologist of Egyptian heritage, and the two married in 1995.
In the 80s Beirut became notorious for Shia militias kidnapping westerners, and Hirst was twice a target of kidnappers, but had the cool, and luck, to escape in the early minutes. John Gittings, who was then on the Guardian foreign desk, remembers Hirst for his calmness. “David was calm in a very uncalm Beirut, sometimes exasperating the desk by dismissing a story as not worth writing, or just being unlocatable, but this served him well the day he was kidnapped. Bundled into a car, he recounted that he realised it was ‘now or never’ and jumped out when it stopped briefly, pushed through a crowd, ran down an alley to find a taxi at the other end which he took to the office from where he calmly phoned us on the desk.”
It is a marker of those dangerous years that when the Sunday Times journalist David Holden was the victim of what was generally acknowledged as a state assassination, after arriving at the airport in Cairo in December 1977, Hirst told me that for decades he believed the killers had mistakenly shot the wrong DH, English journalist.
With characteristic discretion, he disclosed little of his origins. Born in Grange-over-Sands, Cumbria, he came from an English middle-class family. His Middle East life began after leaving Rugby school at the age of 18, with two years of national service (1954-56) as Pte Hirst, in Egypt and in Cyprus, where Greek Cypriots were fighting for the end of British colonial rule. Immediately after that, he studied for a degree at Oxford University.
He then returned to the Middle East as a student at the American University of Beirut until 1963, and became fluent in Arabic. The following year he began writing for the Guardian, based in Beirut and Cyprus, continuing until 2001, and after that making occasional contributions, including obituaries, until 2013. Other papers he wrote for included the Christian Science Monitor, the Irish Times, the St Petersburg Times in Florida, Newsday, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Daily Star in Lebanon, and his book Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East appeared in 2010.
In an article in Middle East Eye in November 2024, headlined Is Israel Going Mad?, Hirst went back to the mid-first century AD and the warring days of Zealots and the Hellenes, describing Israel’s religious Zionists of today as the Zealots. “It was a fundamental societal divide – not unlike the one that is taking place in Israel today – and a critical contributor to the ultimate calamity: Roman conquest, the destruction of the Temple, and the final dispersal of the Jewish people into their ‘exile’ for centuries to come.”
He and Amina spent the last decade living in France. Each evening they watched Al Jazeera television news and analysis, which he enjoyed as “seriously good and honest”. His one regret after receiving his cancer diagnosis was running out of time to finish the new edition of The Gun and the Olive Branch.
He is survived by Amina, his sister Ester and brother Raymond.
• John David Hirst, journalist, born 26 May 1936; died 22 September 2025
