Reporting on Israel: ‘Thirty years on, we are still covering the same old enmities’

The Guardian's outgoing Jerusalem correspondent Oliver Holmes talks to predecessor Ian Black about how much - and how little - the job has changed over the years

It was the end of the 1980s and the Guardian's Middle East correspondent, Ian Black, was talking shop with his competitor at the Sunday Times, the late Marie Colvin. We were discussing when there might be a Palestinian state," Black recalls of their conversation in Jerusalem. We thought maybe it would happen in two or three years."

Israel and the Palestinian territories were deep into the first intifada, an uprising against the occupation that lasted from 1987 until the early 90s. It was a period in which violence spiked, but also a time of nascent hope that the lengthy military grip over Palestinian life might finally end.