NOVANEWS
PFLP hijacker Leila Khaled talks about the acts that made her a household name, the current states of resistance, feminism and religious coercion in Palestinian society, and gives a new take on long-buried tales of assassinations and betrayal within the ranks of the PFLP.
By Paula Schmitt
By the time she was 28, Leila Khaled had already hijacked two planes and held dozens of passengers hostage. Her image appeared on the covers of news magazines, her face was plastered on the walls of student dorms; she become a pop phenomenon, and an inspiration for TV and film characters.
A few days after the death of her brother-in-law and one day before the funeral of her cousin, the 70-year-old Leila combined ingredients in a bowl, making sure the proportions were just right. Careful with the mixture, she poured it in a special, heat-resistance plastic bag, and then added the main ingredient before shutting all of it within a temperature of 250° Celsius. The scents of the baked chicken spread around her Amman apartment, making for a strange addition to an interview on armed struggle, terrorism and politics.
Leila has no regrets about her choices. For her, what she did was fair and justified. In fact, it was a duty. She often quotes Che Guevara with corroborating lines, but Leila didn’t need a guerrilla to help her rationalize her acts. Even Gandhi, everyone’s favorite pet dove, said, “where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.” For Leila, the role of refugee is “contemptible” and “humiliating.” Between two imposed options, that of submissively walking to collect a blanket and a ration card, and that of taking up a Kalashnikov, she chose the latter.
She explains that “the plane hijackings were tactical. Just for a short time, just to ring a bell for the world and make people ask the question: why?” It seemed to have worked. Even the stewardess of the first flight hijacked by Leila said on camera: “It’s still a shame that it’s the way that it is — that the Palestinians don’t have a country.” The PFLP is now against hijackings. In fact, it has banned the practice since 1976, the reason why Wadie Haddad was expelled from the Front.
In her autobiography, Leila herself tells of how one hostage, an old lady, wet her pants out of fear. In the award-winning documentary “Leila Khaled: Hijacker,” director Lina Makboul, herself a Palestinian, questions whether Leila’s actions were good or bad for their people. “She said something like, ‘this action stained your struggle,’” Leila tells me, more surprised than offended. And in her book, she quotes a Syrian colonel who told her: ”This action is not fedayeen-like. It is terrorism.”
“No, that’s not terrorism,” she tells me. “I am a victim of oppression and occupation; we, as a people, have the right to resist by all means.” Then she reminds me again that no one died.
But what if, hypothetically, what if someone had died of a heart attack on that plane out of fear, for example?
“I’d be sorry for that, very sorry, and I’d apologise to his family. I know there was panic, but at the same time I tried to comfort them, not to let them be in panic and so on, and in reality they reached out to the press and no one had a heart attack or anything.”
Just someone who wet her pants.
“Yeah, but I mean, there were very strict instructions not to hurt anyone, especially the passengers, they are not the ones we targeted, our goal was to release the prisoners from Israeli jails, especially the women who were there, they were sentenced to life many times, and to show our comrades and brothers and sisters in jail that you are not alone, we are behind you, we are freedom fighters. This would give more strength to other freedom fighters when they are arrested, so they can face their prosecutors and at the same time they know beforehand that they will be one day released by their comrades”.
I ask if she agrees that sometimes the victim becomes the victimizer.
“Yes. Like the Israelis”.
‘Violence is the mainstream’
Leila was born in Haifa in 1944 and was made to flee on April 13, 1948. It was only four days after her birthday, but it wasn’t celebrated then, and has not been ever since – that April 9th was the day Palestine mourned the first anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre.
Leila’s fight for Palestine is not due to an old, ancient attachment to her land. Her parents are not even Palestinian, but Lebanese. It is a love of justice that moves her. Like Ghassan Kanafani, she also hit a turning point during childhood when she suddenly understood her situation. Kanafani, in a painful and beautiful letter written to his son, describes the moment he realized his condition, the instant after “the disgrace of escape” when at 10 years old he witnessed the men of his family giving up their weapons to become refugees.
“Do not believe that man grows,” he wrote. “No; he is born suddenly – a word, in a moment, penetrates his heart to a new throb. One scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood on to the ruggedness of the road.”
In her biography “My People Shall Live”, Leila recounts a similar experience, when she went to pick oranges from a nearby grove after her arrival in Lebanon, still thinking those were her oranges.
“Darling, [her mother said] the fruit is not ours; you are no longer in Haifa; you are in another country.” Before she rushed into the house to wipe her tears and hide her shame, she looked at me with motherly firmness saying: “Henceforth you are forbidden to eat oranges that are not ours.” With child-like acceptance I nodded my head, but her words still echo. For the first time I began to question the injustice of our exile.”
And also like Kanafani, Leila refused to give up her weapons. She herself was helped by another hijacking, led by a man she never met, and who was not even a member of the PFLP, according to her. While detained in the Ealing police station in London, she was one day surprised to know that someone was demanding her release. “The plane was hijacked by a single man, a Christian Palestinian all by himself.” I asked his name. “Marwan. I don’t know the surname. He hijacked that plane.” The man was not armed. “He deceived the crew. He had his bathing suit underneath and he pulled the elastic and said that was an explosive belt. At that moment, just the day after the collective hijackings, who would say no or dare to doubt him? He said ‘I want to go to Dawson’s field in Amman.’ He called and said ‘I want someone from the PFLP.’ He called Ghassan Kanafani from the plane. So Kanafani called Amman saying there’s another plane for you. People couldn’t believe him. They asked Wadie Haddad [if he had anything to do with that] and he said no, we were not planning for that. I myself was surprised when Mr Frew [chief superintended of the Metropolitan Police in London] told me that the plane had been hijacked. That’s why the British had agreed to release me afterwards, because of their hijacked plane.”
But while the PFLP now considers hijackings unacceptable, violence for Leila is a legitimate weapon. “Resistance doesn’t happen only through violence, but violence is the mainstream.”
You mean the main type of resistance?
“It’s the mainstream. There are several types: political resistance, the popular one, like going to the streets, demonstrating. When our women are embroidering our dresses, this is resistance.”
