To be a foreign correspondent reporting for a British newspaper in Israel is one of the toughest and politically sensitive assignments in journalism. To be based there as a Yorkshire-born Jew, with admiration of a young nation’s achievements while courageously writing critical, albeit balanced, pieces and still retain contacts at the highest level was a near-impossible task. Yet that is what Eric Silver achieved as The Guardian’s man on the spot – and why his pieces have been re-published in this book which is proof of brave foreign reporting at its best.
Revel Barker’s publishing house has done us a great favour by producing this collection of Silver’s writings on Israel and the Middle East, covering 40 years of the most difficul developments in the birth of a remarkable and contentious nation.
Eric Silver died in 2008, aged 73, at the peak of his career, and this book is a careful selection of his writings not only for The Guardian, his principal employer, but also for newspapers in the United States, Canada and India and, sometimes controversially, the Jewish Chronicle. These pieces cover every aspect of the tortuous relationship Israel had, and still has, with its own cultural and historic ethos and with the outside world. What Silver does superbly is to explain the immense paradoxes within the Israeli social and political complex – immigrants having streamed in from the United States and Europe, and from across Africa and the Middle East – with conflicting cultures and historic inheritances often in conflict with the presiding psychology of the nation.
I offer one example of Silver’s reporting to illustrate this, from 1983: “Despite official condemnation of violence and intolerance, it will now take physical as well as moral courage to protest against the Begin government. The national debate is no longer restricted to policy. It has become a struggle for the soul of Israel – a conflict between two political cultures. The children of the mass migration from Muslim countries three decades ago are feeling their strength, redressing old inherited grievances and repudiating the values of the Zionist pioneers.” Had he lived a little longer, Silver might well have been writing along similar lines today.
Ten years ago, writing in The Independent in 2001, he described the scene when Daniel Barenboim and his orchestra defied the Israeli establishment to play a selection of Wagner during a music festival in Jerusalem. Toward the end of the concert, as Silver reported, “Barenboim signalled the orchestra and waited, baton-poised, for silence. As they began to play a love song from Tristan and Isolde, fewer than a dozen objectors walked out, slamming doors and stamping feet. The rest of us sat enthralled through 10 minutes of wrenching lyrical tenderness, the antithesis of the Teutonic bombast that turns some Jews [and not only Jews] off Wagner… at the end the audience gave Barenboim and the Staatskapelle a standing ovation.”
This was typical of Silver’s reporting courage – writing the truth despite his awareness that he was frequently upsetting if not offending the people who could turn his professional life into an intolerable burden. In his introduction, Donald Macintyre, the current staff correspondent for The Independent in Israel, pays a handsome tribute to his old friend, and competitor, for his “great decency and kindness” in never allowing “our grubby business to compromise his dignity”.
All who worked with Eric Silver as, oft times, I did, will echo that epitaph
