My unspoken frontline secret - The Jewish Chronicle

It was a scorching hot June afternoon in a Baghdad suburb. A group of people sat in the shady garden, speaking rapidly in Arabic, catching up on almost two decades of gossip. It was 2003, just months after the invasion and I was staying in the upmarket district of al Mansour with one of the Iraqi opposition leaders. He was a friend from the UK who had recently returned from exile, and I was on assignment for the Jerusalem Report.

Not speaking more than a couple of words of Arabic, I was absorbing the guttural sounds and my exotic surroundings, half listening, mostly contemplative, amid this circle of people who were clearly curious to know who I was and what I was doing. I was shocked out of my polite reverie when my politician friend uttered the word, ''yehudi''. Even I knew what that meant. I remember emitting a cry and simultaneously asking: "Did you just tell everyone here that I'm Jewish?'' Adding: ''Are you crazy?''

I couldn't believe that he had leaked my private information to a crowd of virtual strangers, and while he tried to reassure me that it was no big deal, I was not so sure.

Being Jewish was certainly not something I wanted broadcast in post-conflict Iraq with Saddam Hussein still on the run. As it was, I hadn't been in the country very long before I encountered my first anti-Israel diatribe. My driver, translator and I offered a woman a lift because of the furnace-like, 50-degree heat, but before she had even closed the car door, she was blaming the Israelis for everything.

When I went to interview Palestinians in a Baghdad refugee camp, long-term residents who had been thrown out of their Iraqi homes, I couldn't write the spew of vitriol Iraqis expressed about their Arab brethren who had been given perks by the old regime. I ended up in Iraq because these were the stories I wanted to tell. I wanted to write about what was happening to people who had lived under the brutal dictatorship. In the past, I had written about Iraqis tortured by the regime and others who had to flee to survive. That was what I loved about journalism. Which is why I never felt that my background was relevant to my job because reporting without bias is the objective. I have written for Arab publications, Israeli ones, interfaith ones and international ones.

I didn't want people's views to change about me

I also never said anything because it would change others' perceptions of me. I didn't want to be viewed through the false lens of erroneous stereotypes because, as a journalist, I also enjoyed debunking myths. Ironically, it works both ways. I eventually told my driver, Raad, and translator, Wisam, the name of the publication I worked for, and they were totally intrigued. Wisam confessed he had always wanted to go to Israel.

Being Jewish also forms only one part of my multi-layered identity, which includes being Canadian, female, the influence of having gone to an Anglican school, being secular, living in the UK and dozens of other things.

The first time it vaguely registered that I needed to consider this as an issue was on my previous trip to Iraq in February 2003 when I crossed over from south-east Turkey into northern Iraq. A large group of journalists got caught on the border, which had been closed for a number of years, due to the political wrangling between the Iraqi Kurdish government and the Turks.

At the hotel in the frontier town of Silopi, an Iranian reporter asked me whom I wrote for. I paused for a moment as I considered lying. I chose not to and said: The Jerusalem Report. I thought he would implode on the spot.

I was happy in Ramallah, and spent 18 incredible months in Afghanistan. After weeks of searching I found Kabul's only synagogue on Flower Street, which was obvious when you knew what to look for: a white lattice-work of concrete stars of David that form the outside wall.

I was also not alone. Particularly in Kabul, there were a number of other members of the tribe, but no one ever talked about it, we all just got on with our lives and work. The most amusing moment came when I was on the way to the beautiful Panjshir valley to a house where Afghan hero Ahmed Shah Masood had stayed and where I had formerly been invited for lunch.

During the drive from the capital, the friend I had invited to join me mentioned something obliquely about Passover. I remember looking over at her, and asking if she was Jewish, to which she replied "yes". We had been living in the same house for weeks, and the topic had never arisen - rather like the matzah she had smuggled into the country.

When I travelled to Islamabad in Pakistan in 2013 to visit a friend from Kabul, I thought long and hard about making the trip. Daniel Pearl's horrendous death loomed large. A more than competent reporter, he knew what he was doing, and still managed to get caught in the terrible terror web. It was a salutary lesson. I knew it wasn't what I thought, but what others thought.

In the event, I had a fascinating time in Islamabad and I'd love to return. My views haven't changed because you still have to assess each situation. I'm always cautious but also fairly intrepid, which is the way it should be because terrible things could even happen at a satirical newspaper office in Paris or at a kosher supermarket. You just never know.