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.
