Leila Khaled is the first known woman to lead an airplane hijacking. Her portrait as a young woman, smiling and holding an AK-47, became a symbol of the Palestinian liberation struggle. Born in Haifa in 1944, she became a refugee during the Nakba, or ‘catastrophe’, of 1948, which resulted in the dispossession of an estimated 750,000 refugees and
destruction of hundreds of villages and towns with the founding of the state of Israel. Khaled has been able to see Haifa only once more during her life – in 1969, when, as a member of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, she hijacked a plane and told the pilot to fly over her hometown.
How did your involvement in politics begin? When did you decide to join the armed struggle?
After we were driven out [of Palestine in 1948], we settled in the south of Lebanon, in Tyre, as refugees. It was a miserable life. We were deprived of everything. My first school was a tent. I didn’t like anything there, I missed Palestine. I was convinced we had to go back to our house. I was young, but I asked myself, ‘why do we have to live like this?’
I began to be involved in political issues when my brothers and sisters were in the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM). Our dream was to go back to Palestine. We had to defend our right to return, so we went to demonstrations and called for the right to hold arms.
In 1967, the Naksa [the defeat of Arab armies in the Six Day War] gave us motivation to take up arms and participate in the revolution. The ANM decided to establish the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and I joined as soon as it was formed. I felt we had to take the cause into our own hands. We couldn’t rely on the Arab regimes to take us back to our land, we had to depend on ourselves.
