Skip Navigation. Expand search Search. Antisemitism in the US. This is the only way that we can liberate our land. Your organisation said it was responsible for the attack on the Jerusalem synagogue in November that left five worshippers dead. The programme of PLO calls for achieving the rights of Palestinians even by armed struggle.
It does not only mean demonstrations. Using arms is also popular. Only defend yourselves. But the grenades would have hurt the passengers, had she released them. The plane landed at Heathrow and Khaled was taken to Ealing police station where she was held for 28 days, until the then prime minister, Edward Heath, released her in exchange for western hostages held by the PFLP.
Her stay in Britain was pleasant, she says. They would say to each other: is she the one? They could hardly believe it, this tiny creature sitting on the bench. I was 26 and I was very thin.
I had two policewomen with me in my cell, and we were always discussing our cause and our suffering. After I left I sent them books about Palestine; they asked me to. We wrote to each other. One of them had a problem with her boyfriend, and we often discussed this.
It's an intriguing thought: the Palestinian revolutionary and the Ealing policewoman finding common ground by discussing men. Although it is not, perhaps, so surprising. Women have always related to Khaled. As Eileen Macdonald, in her book Shoot the Women First, puts it: "She shattered a million and one taboos overnight and she revolutionised the thinking of hundreds of other angry young women around the world.
She flamboyantly overcame the patriarchal restrictions of Arab society where women are traditionally subservient to their husbands, by taking an equal fighting role with men, by getting divorced and remarried, having children in her late 30s, and rejecting vanity by having her face reconstructed for her cause.
There were difficulties with being both a woman and a fighter, however. The men in her organisation resented the attention she got, while women were frustrated that she never spoke about women, only about the revolution. She once said, "I represent Palestinians, not women. We can't succesfully end our oppression as women until we first end the oppression of our country. But things seem to have changed for Khaled. We were not mature enough politically.
The question of women is a part of our struggle but not the only part. Revolution must mean life also; every aspect of life. The second wave of feminism was also breaking, adding another aspect to the environment in which news of this young female hijacker would be received.
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, including thousands of refugees from the initial establishment of the State of Israel in , had been living under Jordanian and Egyptian rule, but were now subject to Israeli military occupation.
They were seen by the West as a small, dispossessed refugee people, caught up in the hostility between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, and of little importance except as an excuse for aggression by Arab powers. Amongst the Palestinians of the refugee camps of Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, discontent had been brewing.
As Rosemary Sayigh, who lived in Lebanon throughout the s, puts it:. It is difficult to separate out the Palestinian Resistance Movement PRM from the historical moment and mood in which it first arose, soon after the Six Day War, like a phoenix out of ashes, galvanising a whole nation humiliated by the collapse of the Arab armies.
If the hijacking had made Leila Khaled famous for a few weeks, the audacity and scale of her enterprise extended her notoriety to new heights. For the Palestinian people, the events heralded greater repression in Jordan and the expulsion of militants to Lebanon, and, after further conflict there, on to Tunis and the wider diaspora. For Khaled, the events of meant that her image joined that of Che Guevara on thousands of left-wing walls, and to many she became the archetype of the female revolutionary and the Palestinian woman.
This notoriety was to have significant consequences for her, and for the way she and her cause have been regarded.
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