Deborah did not originally intend to be a journalist. She decided to become a personal assistant after high school and travelled to Paris to work for a wealthy woman within high society. In Paris, she lived within and befriended the community living in the slums for North African immigrants. The contrast between her work within high society and her life witnessing poverty and struggle inspired her to tell the story of this conflict. After leaving Paris, Deborah studied at the University of Tel Aviv amongst Israeli students. Again, outside of her work, she befriended the Palestinian youth living in the region. These two early experiences led to her desire to report on the many stories that can exist within a single world. It has influenced her writing style of incorporating personal stories and observations within her work as a journalist.

Deborah’s writing style has been described as narrative. When asked about whether or not using narrative makes her writing less objective and how she balances her own perspective with the need for objectivity, Deborah responded with the example of the Iraq WMD reports. She pointed out that the original files on Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction were false, and that the journalists who reported on this used an “objective and dry” writing style. The writing style did not make the stories any less false, but instead only mislead the reader into believing the story. Deborah explained that every individual holds a level of bias and that no one is omniscient. Because of this, Deborah writes her stories from a first person point of view in order to inform her readers that these are her observations. With this communicated in the story, she gives the reader the option of accepting or rejecting the truth of her work.