Eric Silver

It is with great sadness that we have heard of the death of Eric Silver, a great reporter on The Guardian and The Independent. He was The Guardian's South Asia Correspondent from 1984 to 1987, and was President of the then Foreign Correspondents' Association of South Asia in 1986.

Eric's primary interest was in reporting from the Middle East, especially Israel. He also spent some years on the Guardian's Labour Staff at the height of Britain's industrial strife in the late 1960s, when I first knew him as a friend and colleague. After his Delhi posting, where we also worked together, he went to live in Jerusalem. There he was the doyen of the foreign press corps and wrote for The Statesman as well as The Independent, Time, and other papers and magazines.

Phil Reeves, one of our committee members, knew him in Jerusalem from late 1999 to early 2002 when they were both reporting for The Independent. He remembers: "We didn't always have exactly the same take on the conflict there, but he was always thoughtful, forgiving of my errors, generous with his time and advice, and a thoroughly decent colleague. We had some excellent long lunches, talking among other issues about the fascinating stalwarts and orators of Old Labour, about Fleet Street. He continued to work with Justin Huggler, when he filled my shoes in Jerusalem".

Aged 73, Eric died on Tuesday night of cancer that was diagnosed only recently. Several obituaries have appeared in the past 24 hours – below is one, by veteran reporter Hella Pick in this morning's Guardian.
John Elliott
President FCC South Asia

Eric Silver
Former Guardian foreign correspondent and expert on Israel and the Middle East
After nearly three decades of writing for the Guardian from Manchester, London, Jerusalem and Delhi, the journalist Eric Silver, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 73, decided to make his home in Israel. Since 1987 he worked as a freelance correspondent for a wide variety of outlets, becoming recognised as a leading reporter and interpreter of Israeli affairs and the Middle East peace process as seen from Jerusalem.

His Yorkshire upbringing and early career had not marked him out for what was to prove a mid-life shift, though as a young man he had been a member of the Habonim Zionist youth movement. As a teenager he put his ambition to be a journalist before all else, and his Zionism was put on hold until he was able to combine life in Israel with journalism.

Eric was born in Leeds, the only son of a Jewish family with roots in Lithuania; his father was an immigrant, his mother English-born. From Roundhay grammar school, Leeds, he won an exhibition to St Catherine's College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics and economics. After a short period in provincial journalism, he joined the Guardian (still based in Manchester) in 1960 as a subeditor, handling first home, then foreign news. When the paper moved its headquarters to London in 1964, he moved south as a general reporter, taking a particular interest in immigration and race.
From 1966 to 1967 he was deputy labour correspondent.

In 1967 Eric had his first experience of reporting on Israel, when the Guardian sent him to cover the aftermath of the six-day war. Back in London from 1968 to 1972, he ran the Miscellany gossip column, taking over from the paper's future editor, Peter Preston. Then, in 1972, he was appointed Jerusalem correspondent of both the Guardian and the Observer, where he was to remain for the next 11 years.

This was an extraordinarily busy period for reporting, even by Middle East standards. Eric's first big story was the Lod airport massacre of May 30 1972, when three members of the Japanese Red Army infiltrated what is now Ben Gurion airport, Tel Aviv, killing 26 people and injuring 80. Then, in September, came the Munich attack, when members of the Israeli Olympics team were taken hostage by Black September terrorists. Eleven Israeli athletes and coaches and five of the eight terrorists died during a rescue attempt.

The following year saw the Yom Kippur war, for which Eric's main role was as an anchorman coordinating the Guardian's coverage. Then, in November 1977, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt became the first Arab leader to visit Israel. The following month, Eric was on board the first civilian plane from Israel to Egypt, an opportunity he relished as it offered him the chance to visit other Arab countries, particularly Jordan and Oman.

There were also two small wars with Lebanon, in 1979 and 1982, and the following year he took leave of absence to write a biography of Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister who had negotiated the 1978 Camp David accords and the peace treaty with Sadat. The book appeared in 1984.

Eric's Jerusalem assignment was supposed to last between three and four years, but he resisted all efforts to persuade him to return to London. The Guardian, which in those days was far more indulgent with the foibles of its correspondents, allowed him to stay on, even though senior staff felt that he was "going native" and that his reporting was no longer sufficiently objective.

It was not until 1983 that he was persuaded to move to Delhi as India correspondent. He enjoyed the challenge of setting up a new bureau and travelled widely in the region, visiting Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Four years later, he was offered the post of chief foreign leader writer in London, but it was not a task he wanted, and, after much agonising, he and his wife Bridget decided to return to Jerusalem, where they already owned a house.

For the first time in his career, Eric found himself having to make a living out of freelancing. A colleague told him that the Middle East story was dying, but six months later the first Palestinian intifada broke out and the region was again big news. As events accelerated, Eric built a formidable array of outlets that included long-term contracts with the Independent and the Jewish Chronicle. He became a regular contributor to the BBC World Service and did work for the BBC Newsnight programme and CNN. For a period, he was senior editor of the Jerusalem News and Report, and he frequently contributed to Time magazine, Macleans magazine in Toronto and the Statesman in Calcutta.

He followed up the success of his Begin biography with The Book of the Just: The Unsung Heroes Who Rescued Jews from Hitler (1992), about so-called righteous Gentiles (such as Oskar Schindler) who had been prepared to risk all to rescue Jews from the Holocaust. The book won several prizes.
Eric was steadfast, loyal and dependable. And, of course, he was an excellent reporter and writer. We joined the Guardian at roughly the same time, but only became good friends after I returned from my first assignment in the US. In 1971, he performed a never-to-be-forgotten act of friendship when he was asked by the editor to give me the news of my mother's sudden death. He organised my return from Brussels, was waiting for me at Heathrow airport and helped with everything that needed to be done. He also helped with crucial research for my biography of Simon Wiesenthal.

Eric never cut his ties with Britain, and cherished the friendships he had formed among the media community. He and Bridget were regular visitors to London as two of their daughters, Rachel and Sharon, live here with their families. Their third daughter, Dinah, is married and lives in Jerusalem. They survive him, as does his wife.

· Eric Silver, writer and journalist, born July 8 1935; died July 15 2008