Eric Silver AFTER NEARLY three decades of writing for the Guardian from 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 variety of outlets, including contributions to The Irish Times, becoming recognised as a leading reporter and interpreter of Israeli affairs and the Middle East peace process.
Born in Leeds, the only son of a Jewish family with roots in Lithuania, he read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. After a period in provincial journalism, he joined the Guardian (still based in Manchester) in 1960 as a sub-editor. When the paper moved to London in 1964, he moved south as a general reporter.
In 1967 the Guardian sent him to cover the aftermath of the six- day war. In 1972, he was appointed Jerusalem correspondent of the Guardian and Observer, where he remained for the next 11 years.
This was a very busy period for reporting in the region. Eric's first big story was the Lod airport massacre of May 30, 1972, in which 26 people were killed by the Japanese Red Army; this was followed by the Munich attack in September 1972, when 11 members of the Israeli Olympics team were killed by Black September terrorists.
The following year saw the Yom Kippur war. Then, in November 1977, Anwar Sadat of Egypt became the first Arab leader to visit Israel. There were two small wars with Lebanon, in 1979 and 1982, and in 1983 year he took leave to write a biography of Menachem Begin, the Israeli leader who negotiated the 1978 Camp David accords and peace treaty with Sadat. The book appeared in 1984.
In 1983 he moved to Delhi as India correspondent. Four years later, he was offered the post of chief foreign leader writer in London, but he and his wife Bridget decided to return to Jerusalem.
Eric found himself having to make a living out of freelancing for the first time. He built a formidable array of outlets that included long-term contracts with the Independent and the Jewish Chronicle. 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. The book won several prizes.
Eric never cut his ties with Britain, and cherished the media friendships he had formed. He and Bridget were regular visitors to London, as two of their daughters, Rachel and Sharon, live there. Their third daughter, Dinah, is married and lives in Jerusalem. They survive him, as does his wife.
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Eric Silver, writer and journalist, born July 8th, 1935; died July 15th, 2008