Eric Silver o"h

A good friend, almost a colleague and a writer of professional standard, despite understandable biases, has passed away today.

Eric Silver.

Eric employed me on his biography of Menachem Begin, "Begin: The Haunted Prophet", New York: Random House, 1984, 278 pp.(*) which led, eventually, to a clash on the pages of The Jewish Chronicle of London when I criticized his description of the Deir Yassin incident after that weekly highlighted, two out of three installments, the book. He wrote a letter and I replied.

I and my wife often talked to him, visited him and his wife Bridgette in downtown Jerusalem and were delighted when one of his daughter, he told us, had gone the chazara b'tshuvah route.

I think the last tme he asked me for information and background was in connection with the death of Shmuel "Moekie" Katz in May. He was always thorough and a stickler for facts and quotation sources. One of his last despatches.

Condolences to the family.

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(*)

''Menachem Begin governed Israel for six years and three months,'' writes Eric Silver, an English journalist, near the close of this incisive biography, ''which made him the longest-serving Prime Minister after the founding father David Ben-Gurion. He revealed himself as a complex, but not a mysterious, man, a paradox but not a puzzle: an unrepentant terrorist who won the Nobel Peace Prize, then launched another war. A democrat and an autocrat. A courtly rabble-rouser, Polish gentleman and Levantine cult hero. A man of honor with whom it was wise to read the small print. A conspirator who found it hard to keep a secret.''

...What is Eric Silver's ultimate judgment of Menachem Begin? He suggests several times that Begin's single-mindedness served to compromise his humanity, that he exercised ''selective compassion,'' showing little sympathy for the loss of non-Jewish lives in the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946, the attack on the Arab village of Deir Yassin in 1948, or the massacre by Christian phalangists of the Palestine refugees in Sabra and Shatilla in 1982.

But in general he takes great pains to be balanced in his judgments. Despite their attempts to dismiss each other's roles, Mr. Silver gives full credit to both the Labor movement and Jabotinsky's heirs in the defeat of the British lion, and, incidentally, argues that Begin was never bloodthirsty in his role as leader of the ''Jewish terror.'' He blames the accidents of history for Deir Yassin and the sinking of the arms-ship Altalena, despite all the ideology that has congealed around these two particular disasters.

And his final judgement of Begin is almost ironic in its even-handedness. ''In the autumn of 1983,'' Mr. Silver concludes, ''the disengagement from the problem of Lebanon showed Israelis soberly aware of their limitations as well as their strengths. That was not the legacy the sixth Prime Minister had meant to leave his people, but it was one worth cherishing.''

This is the first full-scale biography to be written of Menachem Begin, so of course future historians may turn up new evidence. But for the time being, this seems to be an admirably well-balanced view of one of modern history's most controversial figures.