The Pen And The Olive Branch (reporting The Middle East)

A landmark collection of legendary Middle East correspondent David Hirst’s finest reporting.

Over nearly a half century, David Hirst was The Guardian newspaper’s indispensable voice from the Middle East. He was a correspondent of rare courage, scholarship, and clarity, whose reporting on the region’s defining crises guided generations of readers through an otherwise impenetrable world. When other Western journalists fled Lebanon in the late 1980s, Hirst stayed, living and working in Beirut for most of his adult life, surviving two kidnapping attempts, and filing from wars, sieges, and states of emergency across the region. 

This landmark book gathers the best of Hirst’s reporting from the 1967 Arab–Israel War through the Lebanese Civil War, repeated Israeli invasions of Lebanon, two Palestinian intifadas, and the 1991 Gulf War, down to the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Here are the dispatches and long-form analyses that earned Hirst a reputation as one of the great independent Western journalists of his era—a writer whose commitment to honest reportage saw him barred from six Arab countries and denounced by supporters of Israel.

Hirst’s journalism was, unusually, also scholarship. A graduate of the American University of Beirut, he brought an academic’s command of history to daily correspondence, along with a virtuoso reporter’s instinct for what mattered. The pieces collected in these pages reveal how prescient Hirst could be: on Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s fatal compromises, on the Oslo process’s poisoned promise, on the structural violence of occupation, on the region’s leaders and their contradictions. It is reportedly one of Hirst’s greatest regrets that, as the still ongoing genocide in Palestine unfolded, he was unable to finish another revised edition of his celebrated The Gun and the Olive Branch. In its stead, this magnificent retrospective will allow readers to apply his forensic analysis to the current crisis. 

“With his quiet manner and vivid pen, David was a scourge of the powerful.” —Middle East Eye

“Classic.” —Edward Said

“A brilliant analytical mind.” —Robert Fisk

“One of the most respected journalists of his generation, recognised by his peers as an eminently meticulous chronicler of Middle Eastern affairs.” —The National

“No western foreign correspondent has ever had his range of contacts who trusted him, or his depth of research reading.” —Victoria Brittain

“David could make a roomful of boisterous hacks fall silent as he quietly expounded his thoughts. His words had such unmistakable weight and authority.” —The Guardian

David John Hirst (1936–2025) was a leading British journalist and long-time Middle East correspondent for The Guardian. Based in Beirut for much of his career, he was widely regarded as an authoritative voice on the region, particularly on the Arab–Israeli conflict. His books include The Gun and the Olive Branch and Beware of Small States.

Charles Glass was ABC News chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993. Since 1973, he has covered wars in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He is the author of Syria Burning, Tribes with Flags, The Tribes Triumphant, Money for Old Rope, The Northern Front, Americans in Paris, The Deserters, They Fought Alone and Soldiers Don''t Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War. His website is www.charlesglass.net.