Leila Khaled
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Image:Khaled3.jpg Leila Khaled (Arabic: ليلى خالد laylà ẖālid; born April 9, 1944) is a former member of George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), part of the secular, leftwing Palestinian rejectionist front. She is currently a member of the Palestinian National Council
Khaled came to public attention for her role in a hijacking in 1969 and a second attempted one in 1970. The failed attack was one of a number of simultaneous hijackings carried out by the PFLP that triggered the expulsion by King Hussein of Jordan of the PLO from that country, with the loss of between 5,000 and 10,000 Palestinian lives, in what came to be known as Black September.
She is married and lives with her two sons in Amman, Jordan.
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Early life
Khaled was born in 1944 in Haifa, then part of the British Mandate of Palestine. When the Arabs rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan, fighting broke out between the Arabs and Jews, and in 1948 Khaled's family was forced to flee to Lebanon, leaving behind her father, a member of the fedayeen.
At the age of 15, Khaled became one of the first to join the radical pan-Arab Arab Nationalist Movement, originally started in the late 1940s by George Habash, then a medical student at the American University of Beirut. The Palestinian branch of this movement became the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine after the 1967 Six-Day War.
The hijackings
On August 29, 1969 Khaled was part of a team that hijacked TWA Flight 840 on its way from Rome to Athens, diverting the Boeing 707 to Damascus, where it landed after flying over Haifa in order for Khaled to see her birthplace, which she was not allowed to visit. No one was injured, although the aircraft was blown up. The PFLP leadership had thought that Yitzak Rabin, the Israeli ambassador to the United States would be on board. After this hijacking, Khaled underwent the first of several plastic surgeries intended to conceal her identity.
On September 6, 1970, Khaled and Patrick Arguello, a Nicaraguan, attempted the hijack of El Al Flight 219 from Amsterdam to New York as part of the Dawson's Field hijackings; a series of almost simultaneous hijackings carried out by the PFLP. The attack was foiled when Israeli skymarshals killed Arguello before eventually overpowering Khaled. Although she was carrying two hand grenades at the time, Khaled said she had received very strict instructions only to threaten passengers on the civilian flight. The pilot diverted the aircraft to Heathrow airport in London, where Khaled was delivered to Ealing police station. On October 1, the British government released her as part of a prisoner exchange. The next year, the PFLP abandoned the tactic of hijacking.
Later life
Khaled has said in interviews that she developed a fondness for Britain when her first visitor in jail, an immigration officer, wanted to know why she had arrived in the country without a valid visa. She also developed a relationship with the two policewomen assigned to guard her in Ealing and later corresponded with them. Khaled continued to return to Britain for speaking engagements until as late as 2002, although she was more recently refused a visa by the British embassy to address a meeting at the Feile an Phobail in Belfast.
Khaled has said that she no longer believes in hijacking as a legitimate form of protest, though she is wary of recent developments in Israel/Palestine. According to Khaled, “It’s not a peace process. It’s a political process where the balance of forces is for the Israelis and not for us. They have all the cards to play with and the Palestinians have nothing to depend on, especially when the PLO is not united." She has become involved in politics, becoming a member of the Palestinian National Council and appearing regularly at the World Social Forum.
In popular culture
- The song Like Leila Khaled Said from The Teardrop Explodes' 1981 album Wilder is a love song to Khaled. Songwriter Julian Cope said: "She was really one of the most beautiful girls in the whole world" [1]
- The character of savage warrior Leela from Doctor Who was named for Leila Khaled. [2]
References
Further reading
- "I made the ring from a bullet and the pin of a hand grenade" by Katharine Viner, The Guardian, January 26, 2001
- "The guerrilla's story", BBC, January 1, 2001
- Khaled, Leila. My people shall live: the autobiography of a revolutionary. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973, ISBN 0340173807
- MacDonald, Eileen. Shoot the women first. London: Arrow Books, 1992, ISBN 0099138719
- Snow, Peter, and Phillips, David. Leila's Hijack War: The True Story of 25 days in September. London: Pan Books, 1970, ISBN 0330028103de:Laila Chalid
