Leila Khaled

Leila Khaled is a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) operative who hijacked one civilian airliner in 1969 and attempted to hijack a second in 1970, becoming the movement’s most recognizable symbol; she has spent the half century since as a PFLP Political Bureau member and international speaker for an organization the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom all designate a terrorist group. She is often introduced today as an “activist,” a word that does real work concealing what she actually did.

Who she is, and how she got there

Khaled was born on 9 April 1944 in Haifa, then part of British Mandate Palestine. She was four years old when her family fled the city during the 1948 war and settled as refugees in Tyre, Lebanon, one story among the hundreds of thousands caught up in that year’s exodus, whose flight-versus-expulsion mix is still argued case by case rather than settled by slogan. She joined the pan-Arab Movement of Arab Nationalists as a teenager, and in 1967, in the wake of the Arab armies’ catastrophic defeat in the Six-Day War, she became a founding member of George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-Leninist faction that broke from Yasser Arafat’s larger Palestine Liberation Organization over strategy, not goals. Where Fatah favored guerrilla raids by fedayeen inside Israel, the PFLP chose a different theater: international civil aviation, calculated to put the Palestinian cause on front pages that a border skirmish never would.

The 1969 hijacking: TWA Flight 840

On 29 August 1969, Khaled and PFLP operative Salim Issawi seized TWA Flight 840, a Boeing 707 flying from Rome toward Tel Aviv, and forced its pilots to divert to Damascus. The PFLP’s stated target was Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel’s ambassador to Washington, whom the hijackers wrongly believed was aboard; he was not. Khaled later said she ordered the pilot to circle over Haifa so she could see her birthplace before landing. No passenger was hurt; after everyone had disembarked, the hijackers detonated the aircraft’s nose section. Syrian authorities briefly held six Israeli nationals from the flight before releasing them in a swap for a captured Syrian pilot, and released Khaled and Issawi without charge that October. The stunt made her famous: a photograph of her in a keffiyeh cradling an AK-47 was reproduced worldwide, and to avoid being recognized on a future job she underwent six plastic surgery operations on her nose and chin.

The 1970 hijacking attempt: Dawson’s Field and El Al 219

On 6 September 1970, Khaled and Nicaraguan-American PFLP recruit Patrick Argüello tried to hijack El Al Flight 219, Tel Aviv to New York via Amsterdam, as one arm of the coordinated Dawson’s Field hijackings that seized four airliners in a single day. This attempt did not go bloodlessly: when El Al’s captain, Uri Bar-Lev, threw the plane into a steep dive to knock the hijackers off balance, Argüello opened fire and shot steward Shlomo Vider, wounding him seriously, before an armed sky marshal shot Argüello dead. Passengers and crew subdued Khaled, and Bar-Lev made an emergency landing at London Heathrow less than twenty minutes later, where British police arrested her. She was held under British immigration law without trial. The PFLP hijacked a fifth aircraft, a BOAC VC10, days later specifically to add British hostages to its leverage, and then blew up three of the captured planes at Dawson’s Field in Jordan in front of international news cameras. Britain released Khaled in early October 1970 as part of the multi-government exchange that freed the Dawson’s Field hostages, without her ever facing trial for the attempt that killed her own accomplice and wounded a crew member.

After the hijackings

Khaled never left the PFLP and never renounced the tactics. She went on to sit on the Palestinian National Council and later the PFLP’s Political Bureau, and has spent the decades since as a public speaker for the organization, based for most of that time in Amman, Jordan. Israel, the United States and other governments bar her entry, but university departments, film festivals and left-wing conferences across Europe and North America have repeatedly hosted her, and a 2006 documentary, Leila Khaled: Hijacker, cemented her as a subject of ongoing fascination rather than a retired footnote.

The icon, and who builds it

Khaled’s image, keffiyeh and rifle both, has been reproduced on murals, T-shirts and protest posters for fifty years as shorthand for “resistance,” a word worth pausing on since its meaning shifts depending on who is doing the resisting. The romance survived a real test in September 2020, when San Francisco State University’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies Department hosted her for a webinar titled “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice and Resistance.” Zoom refused to host it, and Facebook and YouTube pulled it mid-stream, all three citing her documented membership in a US State Department-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. Before the feed was cut, roughly 900 viewers heard her tell the audience: “People have the right to fight those who occupy their land by any means possible, including weapons.” That sentence, not “activist,” is the accurate lead.

What Khaled didn’t do, and what she still is

Khaled personally killed no one: the fatal shot at Dawson’s Field came from Argüello’s gun and the sky marshal’s, not hers, and the 1969 operation left no one dead or injured. She has also been consistent and public about her methods rather than hiding behind euphemism, more than can be said for institutions that now launder the word “activist” over what she did.

None of that changes what a hijacking is under international law, an act the 1970 Hague Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft was written specifically to criminalize in response to attacks like hers, or that the organization she has served for sixty years remains, by the assessment of every Western government that has looked at it, a terrorist one.