One Women Four Planes: Leila Khaled

One Women Four Planes: Leila Khaled

Leila Khaled is the first woman to hijack a plane. She was a very smart woman in her tactics on how to persuade the pilot to give up control of the aircraft with grenades. She was so dedicated to her cause that she even got facial reconstruction surgery so she can do her last hijack. However, she was predictable and the popular front for the liberation of Palestine was a violent group. Their purpose was to get a free Palestine but they went about it the wrong way. Hijacking three planes and holding a large group of British people hostage then blowing up the planes are not going to solve the problem. After reading up on her we wanted to know why such a beautiful young lady did become so violent? How did she get radicalized? How could she have been stopped? My hypothesis is that if she was able to go back to Haifa before her faith in the government was tainted she would not have joined a PFLP and would not have hijacked a plane.

Leila Khaled was born in April 9, 1944 in Haifa, Palestine. Khaled's family fled to Lebanon during the 1948 Palestinian exodus, before the state of Israel was constituted. She is a member of the Popular front for the Liberation of Palestine, the PFLP is described as a terrorist organization by the USA, is a Palestinian Marxist-Leninist and revolutionary leftist organization founded in 1967. It’s second-largest of the groups forming the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) with purpose of creating an independent State of Palestine and t was considered by the United States and Israel to be a terrorist organization until the Madrid Conference in 1991.

At the age of 15, (following her brother), she joined the radical pan-Arab (Arab Nationalist Movement), the Palestinian branch of this movement became PFLP. On August 29, 1969, Khaled was part of a team that hijacked an airplane on its way from Rome to Athens. She claims she ordered the pilot to fly over Haifa, which she could not visit because she is a refugee. Nobody was injured in the attack, but the aircrafts were blown up after hostages had disembarked. Khaled underwent six plastic surgeries to conceal her identity and allow her to take part in a future hijacking. Subsequently in 1970, Leila and Patrick Arguello (who was killed in the terrorism attack) hijacked a Flight from Amsterdam to New York City in an unsuccessful attack and Khaled was delivered to Ealing police station. Later on, the British government released her as part of a prisoner exchange. The next year, the PFLP abandoned the tactic of hijacking. As today she is married to the physician Fayez Rashid Hilal, and lives with their two sons in Amman, Jordan.

Such a beautiful women became so violent because she lived a hard life beginning in April 1948, when she was 4 years old her family and around 750.000 Palestinians were displaced from their home because the Arab-Israeli, before the Zionist ethnic cleansing operations could reach them (Palestinian Arabs were expelled from the area that became Israel). Also, she left her father behind because he briefly joined the Palestinian resistance. Her family, like all the others, grew up experiencing the poverty of war. After all, she got a scholarship to study at the American University of Beirut, but couldn’t finish due to financial difficulties.

Leila Khaled got radicalize after all the issues in her life, Leila grew up being a victim of a war, forced to flee their country which left them homeless and without her father who decided to stay fighting for the country. Been a refugee in a new country with nothing, no home, no father, no money their conditions of life were precarious. This gave her the strength to become an idealist and fight for her country like her brothers and dad.

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