David Hirst: 'An outstanding journalist we were lucky to have'

David Hirst, who died on Monday in a hospital in France, was the outstanding journalist the Guardian was lucky enough to have, writing for the paper from the inside of the Middle East’s dramatic transformations over more than four decades. 

No western foreign correspondent has ever had his range of contacts who trusted him, or his depth of research reading. Hirst’s quiet demeanour and scholarly manner belied a fierce commitment to powerful and dispassionate reporting and analysis, despite the bitter criticism he attracted from governments across the region, most notably and relentlessly from Tel Aviv.

In the Guardian, his rare visits to the paper were an event. When he gave a talk to assembled journalists in the editor’s office, he was an unchallengeable authority, but also an obvious outsider in a small liberal world mostly preoccupied with Westminster and other parochial British interests. 

To me, there after a decade living in Saigon, Algiers and Nairobi, David personified the wider world I loved. Working with him was a privilege. To me he was a journalist of the stature of Seymour Hersh, IF Stone, Wilfred Burchett, John Pilger, some of whom I knew and all of whom taught me, as David did, that real journalism meant relentless hard work and courage in facing power. 

With his quiet manner and vivid pen, David was a scourge of the powerful. He represented everything that the 270 Palestinian journalists targeted and assassinated in Gaza by the IDF also stood for.

And even when he was periodically banned from countries such as Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, David’s sources did not dry up. Political exile of writers, artists, intellectuals and opposition figures was one of the common threads of the decades of dictators in the region which David chronicled with unsparing clarity and fearless honesty. 

Clarity and fearless honesty

Writing in the Guardian on the day of Saddam Hussein’s execution by the American occupation forces he compared him to Stalin, “he too had little of the flair or colour of other 20th century despots, little mental brilliance, less charisma, no redeeming passion or messianic fervour; he was only exceptional in the magnitude of his thuggery, the brutality, opportunism and cunning of the otherwise dull, grey apparatchik”.  

Such descriptive phrases on the towering figures of the time would stick in the mind for ever, such as on Yasser Arafat’s “notorious egotism… obsessive desire for personal control and domination… his preference for loyalty over competence”.

With his quiet manner and vivid pen, David was a scourge of the powerful

David’s friends and sources for his inimitable analysis were a patchwork of great creative people deprived of their homelands, none more than Palestinians, who peopled his adopted homeland of Lebanon.

His seminal work, published first in 1977 and twice reprinted, was The Gun and the Olive Branch, a classic, myth-breaking history from the 1880s of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, which appeared a decade before the revisionist history books of the Israeli New Historians, such as Professors Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim.

It was his great regret in his last years that he was unable to finish another revised edition, as the genocide of the past two years opened a completely new era.

David wrote for many other media outlets beyond The Guardian, including the Christian Science Monitor, the Irish Times, the St Petersburg Times in Florida, Newsday, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Daily Star in Lebanon.

His very last article, for Middle East Eye in November 2024, was a fitting apotheosis: “Is Israel going mad?”  He used the mid 1st century AD and the wars of the Zealots and the Hellenes as the historical framework for today’s religious Zionists. 

Original and honest

“It was a fundamental societal divide - not unlike the one that is taking place in Israel today - and a critical contribution 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 concluded.

David’s  last decade was spent living happily in a village in what he liked to call, “the depths of La Douce France” where every night he and Amina, his beloved wife of three decades, watched Al Jazeera television news and analysis, which he called, “seriously good and honest”.  

Those words exactly fit David and the original and honest work that was his life. He was, he said in the last weeks, quite “reconciled” to his death. He stated: “I’ve had a long life.” It is all our loss that he is not with us to write about the genocide and existential crisis of Palestinians today; but the loss of this kind and gentle man will be felt in many more private ways than that.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.