Eric Silver: Insightful Anglo-Israeli journalist

Eric Silver was a leading Anglo-Israeli journalist in Israel, author of a well-regarded biography of Menachem Begin, and one of the most insightful commentators on Israeli politics since the foundation of the state. He was always very much a professional journalist who could be guaranteed to produce intelligent and well balanced prose in the shortest possible time.

I asked him if he would like to work for The Independent in Jerusalem on a part-time basis in 1995 and he immediately accepted. I always found him a reassuring and confident presence, with a well developed sense of the direction Israeli politics were going, though this was usually a direction of which he wholly disapproved after the assassination of the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing fanatic in 1996.

When more than usually depressed by political developments, I would take refuge in his beautiful 19th-century house in Rehov Ha'Nevi'im (Street of the Prophets) where the Pre-Raphaelite painter Holman Hunt had once lived. Sometime after I had left Jerusalem, a suicide bomber blew himself up in the street outside the house, blowing out the windows.

Eric Silver was born the son of Lithuanian immigrants in Leeds in 1935. His mother had a fashion business and his father was a bookie. As a young man he was a member of a Zionist youth movement, most of whose members went to Israel but Eric went to St Catherine's College, Oxford, where he read politics, philosophy and economics. On graduating he worked on local papers in Harrogate and Darlington before joining The Guardian as a copy editor in Manchester in 1960. He was to stay on The Guardian until 1987. He worked as a reporter, industrial correspondent and gossip columnist and wrote about sports at the weekend. He was sent to Israel to report on the aftermath of the 1967 war and five years later was appointed staff correspondent for The Guardian and The Observer in Jerusalem. In 1984 his book Begin: the haunted prophet was published to general acclaim and the same year he was appointed as correspondent to India with which he retained a strong connection even after he returned to Israel in 1987 with his wife Bridget and daughters Rachel, Dinah and Sharon, rather than going to Britain.

He returned to Israel as freelancer, never an easy job in a country where many others are ready, willing and able to work for the foreign press. A colleague had told him that the story was dying and he might have difficulty finding stories to file. In fact the first Palestinian intifada was about to break out and the Israel-Palestinian story was to be at the centre of media coverage for years to come. He also had the advantage of writing elegantly and succinctly.

Even so Eric often seemed on occasion a little melancholy about becoming a full time freelance. He would remark that in returning to Israel he had made a serious professional sacrifice. "I had a career and now I have a business," he would say, which was an objective assessment of where he stood. He worked at different periods for Time magazine, the Financial Times, The Jewish Chronicle, The Jerusalem Report, Maclean's and The Statesman (Calcutta). He also wrote books including The Book of the Just: the unsung heroes who rescued Jews from Hitler (1992) and was co-author of Shalom Friend, the Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin (1996).

Strongly built and seldom ill he was recently treated for back pain but he continued working until a few weeks ago when the pain was diagnosed as a symptom of pancreatic cancer.

Patrick Cockburn

Eric Silver, journalist: born Leeds, Yorkshire 8 July 1935; reporter, Harrogate Herald 1957-59; copy editor, Northern Echo 1959-60; copy editor, The Guardian 1960-64, reporter 1964-72, foreign correspondent 1972-87; married 1959 Bridget Hale (three daughters); died Jerusalem 15 July 2008.