News of the death of Ian Black, at the age of 69 from a rare brain disease, brought a pair of emails within minutes of each other: one from a Jew with strong ties to Israel, the other from a distinguished Palestinian analyst and sometime peace negotiator. Both expressed the same combination of affection and admiration for a journalist who, in a long, accomplished career, much of it spent covering perhaps the most vexed conflict in the world, somehow managed to retain the respect of both sides. Even if they rarely agreed on much else, they found common ground on this: when it came to coverage of the Middle East, you could trust Ian Black.
Even as a presence in the Guardian newsroom, where he held the posts of diplomatic editor and Europe editor as well as Middle East editor, he embodied the correspondent’s duty to show fairness to both parties. Colleagues would hear him taking alternate phone calls, chatting happily to a source in Arabic at one moment, switching to Hebrew for a warm catch-up with an Israeli contact the next.
That refusal to reinforce the narrative of one side alone informed his writing on the Israel-Palestine conflict from the start. His first book, published in 1986, grew out of a doctoral dissertation that had required him to plunge deep into the Hebrew archives. Zionism and the Arabs, 1936-39, was insistent in its focus not on one nation or the other but on both – and the point at which they collided.
In his last book, the widely praised Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017, there was the same two-eyed determination to see the whole picture. Take the question of Palestinian labour. Ian noted how the earliest Zionist pioneers, for all their rhetorical commitment to the spiritually reviving power of avodah Ivrit, Hebrew labour, relied from the start on Arab workers to help build their state. That pattern endured even a century later, as Ian observed Palestinians performing all kinds of tasks essential for the modern Israeli economy. A polemicist would have used that fact to expose the supposed hypocrisy of the Israeli project or, alternatively, to castigate the contradiction of Palestinians enabling the very enterprise they so vehemently opposed.
But Ian was not interested in debating points, but rather in uncovering complexity. And so he also gave the floor to Palestinians complaining about restrictions ordered by the then (and current) Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, limiting their ability to travel from the occupied West Bank into Israel for work.
“Most of the people in our village want to be connected to Israel [and to] have the opportunity to work in Israel,” one Palestinian told him. As the book’s New York Times reviewer noted, “Zionism’s need for Palestinian labour, and the willingness of many Palestinians to provide it, fits comfortably into neither the Zionist nor Palestinian nationalist narrative. But Black weaves it into his.”
Of course, no writer in this area could ever hope to please everyone. An Israeli reviewer of the 2017 book thought he had detected a tendency of Ian’s to use emotive language to describe killings by Israelis, while deploying a balder lexicon when recounting killings by Palestinians. “It is only the Israelis who ‘incinerate’ and ‘blow apart’,” he wrote. In the 1980s, when Ian was this newspaper’s correspondent in Jerusalem, Jewish students organised a demonstration outside the Guardian’s offices on Farringdon Road, central London, to protest against the supposed injustice of his coverage of the first intifada. Nearly four decades later, it is Ian’s reading of events, rather than his critics’, that seems the more prescient.
Born in Sheffield, Ian was the son of Rita and Wilfrid Black, who, like many Jews of that period, had made his way in the garment business. The middle child of three, Ian attended Clifton college in Bristol and then Leeds grammar school, before heading to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1971 to study history, and social and political science. Three years later, he was a doctoral student at the London School of Economics, where he embarked on the work that would become the first of several authoritative books on Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians.
Still, the new Dr Black was curious to report on the world of the present, as well as to study the past. He joined the Guardian in 1980 as a subeditor – and would stay at the paper another 36 years. His talent was spotted early, including by the celebrated Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who in 1983 handpicked Ian as one of the earliest recipients of the Stern fellowship, enabling him to spend a summer as a reporter on the paper.
Promotion at the Guardian came a year later, when the editor, Peter Preston, dispatched Ian to Jerusalem as Middle East correspondent. From there, he would cover both the first Palestinian intifada and the Oslo peace process, which culminated in a handshake on the White House lawn between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in 1993.
By then, Ian was established as a “star favourite of the foreign desk”, in the words of his former colleague Victoria Brittain, cherished for being both deeply expert and capable of filing reliable copy to deadline (a rarer skill than many readers might realise). Friends described his sensitivity and warmth in private conversation, recalling his repeated declaration that two of the qualities he admired most were bravery and loyalty.
In his coverage of the Middle East, he regularly pushed boundaries. Just as the sight of Ian, in rumpled jacket, shirt-tails hanging out, became a fixed point in the newsroom, so his regular laments on the apparently futile quest for a visa to visit Saudi Arabia became, for a time, part of the permanent soundtrack of the office. But he persisted and eventually made several reporting trips to the kingdom, producing a series of memorable dispatches.
“I will always remember him as someone whose non-partisan reporting on Saudi Arabia was informative at a time when its rulers drew an iron curtain around its many controversial issues from terrorism to repression,” recalled Professor Madawi al-Rasheed of the LSE. “He was both a journalist and an academic, approaching the complex crises that plagued the region with objectivity and integrity.”
Travel to the Middle East allowed Ian to indulge another passion. He was an avid collector of political memorabilia, or more precisely political kitsch, with a particular penchant for trinkets manufactured for the glorification of dictators. So it was that he and his wife, Helen, came to share their home with a brass portrait of a glowering Saddam Hussein, a ceramic tile bearing the stern features of Ayatollah Khomeini, and a silver bust of the Bulgarian president Todor Zhivkov, to say nothing of a Vladimir Putin pencil sharpener, constructed in such a way that the writing implement appeared to penetrate the Russian autocrat in an intimate place.
After he left the Guardian in 2016, having concluded nearly a decade as Middle East editor, Ian continued writing and broadcasting on the region. It was during a television appearance in 2020 that he found himself, as he put it, “lost for words”. A year later came a diagnosis of frontotemporal lobar degeneration, an extremely rare neurological disease that slowly reduced both his speech and mobility.
Last October, he wrote for this paper’s Saturday magazine about the illness in a piece which struck an immediate chord with readers: “It is hard to ignore the increasing realisation that as my brain is shrinking, so is my world.”
Even then, he was determined to give both sides to the story. “Not everything is negative,” he added, “my friends and family have been amazingly kind and supportive.” As always, Ian wanted to paint the whole picture.
His first marriage, to Maya Barr, ended after 11 years in divorce in 1987. Three years later he married the author Helen Harris; she survives him, along with their daughters, Nina and Rebecca, and Nico, his son from his first marriage.
• Ian Myles Black, journalist and author, born 15 July 1953; died 22 January 2023
