Dictionary of the Middle East

By Dilip Hiro, St. Martin’s Press, 1996, 367 pp. . List: $18; AET: $14.

Reviewed by Richard H. Curtiss

It was love at first sight when this book arrived in the mail. For hours after I opened it, I couldn’t put it down. I started by looking up the alphabetically listed entries on subjects I know well, and sometimes I found that I didn’t know quite as much about them as I had thought.

For example, there were no surprises among the names and relationships of some 15 extinct and living “Semitic languages.” But under “Hostage-taking and hostages” there were some new thoughts, for me at least, in the connections made between the kidnapping in Lebanon of 14,000 people (of whom 10,000 were killed) that began in 1975, the holding of 67 American Embassy diplomats in Tehran in 1979, the seizure of four Iranian diplomats taken hostage (and killed) by Christian militiamen in Beirut in 1982, the subsequent seizure in Beirut of between 10 and 20 British and American hostages (three of whom were killed) between 1982 and 1991, and the holding by Israel of hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinians in the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

I learned even more things I should have known but didn’t from the hundreds of listings for people. For example, two military officers named Arif were the successive presidents of Iraq while I was posted there in the 1960s. I knew they were brothers but I didn’t realize until I read their entries in this book that the first President, Abdel Salam Arif, who took control away from the Ba’ath party in 1963 and held it until he was killed in a 1966 helicopter crash, was succeeded by his older brother, Abdel Rahman Arif, who in turn lost power to the Ba’ath in 1969. If I had written about them before checking with this book, I would have assumed the successor was the younger brother, and I would have been wrong.

Because I’ve written in the past about the infamous “Lavon Affair,” a scheme hatched in 1954 by political protégés of former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to firebomb British businesses and American diplomatic establishments in Cairo and Alexandria and blame Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, I realized that former Israeli Minister of Defense Pinchas Lavon had been unfairly blamed for the whole thing by, among others, Moshe Dayan, who actually gave the orders, when the 13 bombers, all but one recruited from the Egyptian Jewish community, were caught.

The resulting feud, which set the stage for the 1956 Israeli attack on Egypt which in turn led to Israel’s 1967 “pre-emptive attack” on Egypt all over again, polarized Israeli politics for years. What I didn’t know was that when Israel finally occupied the West Bank in the 1967 war— which had been the goal all along—Lavon was among those who wanted to give back the territories seized in exchange for peace, and it was Ben-Gurion’s protégés—now hailed as the builders of Israel—who insisted on hanging on to the territories, thus perpetuating the mess Israel has been in since its creation.

And then there are the histories. The nearly three-page entry under “Lebanese civil war “ is so thorough that author Dilip Hiro has divided it into “phases,” starting with phase 1 from April 1975 to May 1976 (all of which I experienced personally while serving in the American Embassy in Beirut) and ending with Phase 9, from October 1989 to October 1990. Since one of Hiro’s 20 other books is about the Lebanese civil war, it’s no wonder that this entry is so complete and accurate.

Similarly there are two entries, one for “North Yemen civil war”covering the long one from 1962 to 1970 and one for “Yemen civil war” covering the short one from April 27 to July 4, 1994. And there is “Gulf War I” (eight phases described in two-plus pages) from 1980 to 1988 and “Gulf War II” (another two-plus pages) from Aug. 2, 1990 to Feb. 27, 1991. Besides the chronologies of each war’s events, the Dictionary of the Middle East lists the human and material cost estimates from both sides for both wars. And, not incidentally, Dilip Hiro has written separate books on each of the Gulf wars: The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict, published in 1991, and Desert Shield to Desert Storm: The Second Gulf War, published in 1992.

So who exactly is this writing machine, whose voice is heard on U.S. radio talk shows, who appears even more frequently on BBC programs, and whose articles turn up regularly in both mainstream and specialized publications in the U.K., U.S. and Canada?

I first encountered Dilip Hiro when he discussed one of his three books on Iran at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. Later I found myself paired with him on Pacifica Network radio talk shows, he speaking from London and I from Washington. What I enjoyed about those joint appearances was his objectivity. He always knew the details of breaking news stories, but never went off the deep end interpreting them. When I congratulated him after receiving his book, we arranged to met for lunch while he was in Washington to participate in a seminar on Central Asia.

Born into a Hindu family in the Indian subcontinent before its partition in 1947, Dilip Hiro graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in industrial management in 1964. Since then he has lived and worked as a journalist in Britain. Half of his books have been on the Middle East, but he also has written two books on India, another on Indians living in Britain and yet another on racial minorities there, and six works of fiction.

In person he is unassuming but just as voluble in conversation as in writing. What won me over completely, however, was his expression of awe and wonder at the fact that CAMERA, the Israel lobby’s East Coast thought police (FLAME serves the same role on the West Coast) has orchestrated a letter-writing campaign of complaints by American Jews to the publisher. Although I’d found the near total absence of polemics in Hiro’s exhaustive treatment of controversial Middle Eastern subjects surprising, the campaign against him was not. Just because his book contains so many valuable facts so interestingly presented, it becomes a threat to the pro-Israel spinmeisters in a country where the mainstream media discourse on the Middle East is as limited as it is misleading.

It’s customary for a book reviewer to point out an error or two just to prove, if nothing else, that he read the book. In fact, although I might challenge an opinion or two regarding U.S. motives in the Middle East, I found that a major strength of the book is that Hiro is as generous in supplying useful facts as he is sparing with personal opinions or interpretations. If I have any bone to pick, therefore, it is with the publisher of the U.S. paperback edition, who allowed some egregious typos to slip through—three on pages 40 and 41 alone.

My only real regret is at Dilip Hiro’s strict definition of the “Middle East” (which he explains in the entry under that title). The Middle East covered in the book stops at Egypt in the west and at Iran in the east. All the Arab states in between, plus Israel, are thoroughly covered. But there are no entries for Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco or Mauritania in North Africa, nor for Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia and Djibouti in Africa south of Egypt, nor for Pakistan or Bangladesh in the subcontinent, although all share a religion and many cultural similarities with the Middle Eastern Arabs and Iran.

Nevertheless, this book is a dream come true for any professional editor or writer on Middle East matters. Many times, up against an editorial deadline, I’ve accepted an author’s word for dates, locations or spellings while silently wishing there were some very quick and accurate way to check for myself. Now there is.

Dictionary of the Middle East will be even more valuable to students and others who haven’t had the benefit of life-long Middle Eastern exposure. Recently I was asked by one prolific American writer of op-ed pieces and letters to the editor why so few of his efforts are printed. “Because you spoil them with factual errors,” I explained. “Why don’t you look up everything you bring up unless you’re absolutely sure of the spelling of a name or the date of an event?”

“Without a couple of hundred books on the Middle East in my library, there’s really no way I can do that,” he replied.

Well, now there is. Everyone who expresses opinions on Middle East affairs should own this book. While flipping through its more than 1,000 subject entries, and its excellent index as well, every user will thank Dilip Hiro for writing it, and maybe even this reviewer for recommending it so unreservedly. Don’t leave your home without it.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report.