Graham Usher

Graham Robin Usher (12 December 1958 – 8 August 2013) was a British journalist who became the first Palestine correspondent of The Economist. In a career that took him from London to Gaza, Islamabad and New York, he won particular praise for his reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict during the Oslo process and Second Intifada. The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said wrote in 1996 that Usher did "the best foreign on-the-spot reporting from Palestine".

Early life and education Usher was born on the Debden Estate, a large council estate in Essex, just outside London, the second son of Mary Usher and John Usher, a printer and trade union activist. during which time he was active in East London's revolutionary left milieu.

Usher was to derive from his working-class upbringing, and the radical milieu in which he spent his twenties, a political framework that both shaped his motivations as a journalist, and informed his analysis of the events on which he reported.

Usher made his base in Gaza for a few years, then the only Western correspondent to do so, but by 1996 he had moved to Jerusalem. There, he lived five minutes' walk from the offices of the Institute of Jerusalem Studies (later the institute for Palestine Studies) in Sheikh Jarrah.

He wrote two books, Palestine in Crisis (1995) and Dispatches from Palestine (1999), both of which were published by Pluto Press. In a review of the former, Joel Beinin wrote that Usher was "one of the most knowledgeable journalists writing in English about the West Bank and Gaza Strip." Two years later the couple moved to Islamabad, Pakistan, where Plett had accepted a new posting. Usher wrote from there for the London Review of Books.

In 2009 the couple moved again, this time to New York. Both reported on the United Nations; Plett for the BBC, and Usher for Al-Ahram Weekly.

Usher's dispatches for Al-Ahram Weekly included a November 2011 article in which he argued that India, Brazil and South Africa had failed to bring a fresh voice to the United Nations. They had advocated "human rights in theory while backing sovereignty in practice," he wrote.

Death Usher died on 8 August 2013 at his home in New York of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. He was described by The Nation as one of its best foreign correspondents of the preceding two decades.