The Funerals of Two Soldiers and a Newsman

by David Silverman/Getty Images

Everywhere I went today, baffled and angry Israelis asking me to explain what I thought of the prisoner swap. The nation changed overnight. Before, they were all for it. Anything to get the two missing Israeli soldiers back home and buried with honor.

But I guess it was seeing the TV news of Hizballah gloating and jeering, and Samir Kuntar, whom Israelis refer to as "the child-murderer", parading around in a camouflage jacket with so many medals that it looked like a swarm of bees had settled on his chest. That's what did it. By morning, when thousands turned out for the funerals of Reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, the mood had shifted in the public. "What are we ... suckers?" said a neighbor I encountered in the parking lot. "I'll bet Hamas and Hizballah are preparing another kidnapping right now. They know we'll give away everything!"

I didn't go to the soldiers' funerals. Along with many of my journalist colleagues, I stayed in Jerusalem, and went to a different funeral, for Eric Silver, 73, a frequent contributor to Time and a mainstay of the Jerusalem Bureau. A former Oxford-educated foreign correspondent for The Guardian, stationed in Jerusalem and in New Delhi, Eric turned down a job back in London as a foreign editorial writer to return to Jerusalem as a freelancer. It was a brave, tough choice. Eric and his wife Bridget lived in an ancient stone house on the Street of the Prophets, and Eric would tell the story, with under-stated irony, of how a suicide bomber's head landed near the Silver's garden, catapulted there by the blast.

Eric possessed a gentle wisdom and tireless curiosity; a few months back he was out interviewing Neo-Nazi skinheads and hunting down an archeological scoop at King Herod's tomb. Time hauled him in on the big stories, and Eric, with the depth of his knowledge, invariably guided us in the right direction. As an Englishman, he was slightly bemused by the idiosyncrasies of the Time edit machine.

Eric was originally from Leeds and loved his cricket. It turned out that Eric and I had lived, at different times, in the same New Delhi apartment building, and I know exactly why Eric chose the place: it had a view of a Mogul general's tomb surrounded by dusty gardens that swarmed with Indian kids playing a thousand noisy games of cricket. The scene had that perfect balance of the foreign and familiar that Eric, ever the Yorkshire lad, thrived on. He died swiftly of pancreatic cancer and is survived by his wife Bridget, three daughters, and 10 grand children. Shalom and Goodbye, Eric.

by Tim McGirk/Jerusalem