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The Pen and the Olive Branch: Writings of a Legendary Middle East Correspondent

By (author) David Hirst, Edited by Charles Glass

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A landmark collection of legendary Middle East correspondent David Hirstâ€™s finest reporting. Over nearly a half century, David Hirst wasÂ The GuardianÂ newspaperâ€™s indispensable voice from the Middle East. He was a correspondent of rare courage, scholarship, and clarity, whose reporting on the regionâ€™s defining crises guided generations of readers through an otherwise impenetrable world. When other Western journalists fled Lebanon, 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 Hirstâ€™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 eraâ€”a writer whose commitment to honest reportage saw him barred from six Arab countries. Hirstâ€™s seminal work,Â The Gun and the Olive BranchÂ (1977), was described as â€œthe most malignantly anti-Israel book ever to be published in English,â€ while his seniorÂ GuardianÂ editors were routinely upbraided by Israeli embassy officials for his coverage. Hirstâ€™s journalism was, unusually, also scholarship. A graduate of the American University of Beirut, he brought an academicâ€™s command of history to daily correspondence, along with a correspondentâ€™s instinct for what mattered. These pieces reveal how prescient Hirst could be: on Palestinian leader Yasser Arafatâ€™s fatal compromises, on the Oslo processâ€™s poisoned promise, on the structural violence of occupation, on the regionâ€™s leaders and their contradictions. It is reportedly one of Hirstâ€™s greatest regrets that, as the still ongoing genocide in Palestine unfolded, he was unable to finish another revised edition of his book. In its stead, this magnificent retrospective will allow readers to apply his forensic analysis to the current crisis.