Leila Khaled: Plane hijacker and the essence of Palestinian rage
As the pilot reached for the microphone to update passengers on TWA Flight 840, the woman standing beside him gently took it from his hand. Speaking calmly and elegantly, as if performing a daily routine, she addresses the cabin in English.
"Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. This is your new captain speaking, Shadia Abu Ghazaleh, from the Che Guevara Unit of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine."
Months before that August day in 1969, Shadia Abu Ghazaleh had been killed in Nablus, becoming the first female Palestinian martyr after the 1967 war. The speaker, Leila Khaled, took on her fallen comrade's name as a nom de guerre.
The hijacking was successful and the plane was rerouted from Rome to Damascus, where it was evacuated and then blown up. Leila Khaled’s striking photos were soon splashing across global headlines.
She returned to Beirut to go underground, undergoing plastic surgery to alter her now-famous face in preparation for her next mission.
The second operation came in September 1970 and was even more ambitious: the simultaneous hijacking of three planes, including one from Israel’s El Al airline. However, that attempt failed after the pilot performed a midair maneuver. Khaled's Latin American comrade was killed, and she was captured and imprisoned in London.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine/PFLP to secure her release, announced at a press conference where the late writer Ghassan Kanafani spoke, the terms of an exchange: Khaled in return for the passengers of the other hijacked planes.
The deal went through.
The hijacker-turned-icon returned to Beirut, choosing a humble home in Shatila refugee camp, protecting herself from fame's arrogance.
A woman's voice
In 2004, Swedish filmmaker of Palestinian origin Lina Makboul traveled to Amman to produce "Leila Khaled: Hijacker (2005)". In her voice over at the film's outset, she explains that Leila had been her childhood idol, a Palestinian woman like herself, united by the dream of a free Palestine.
In documentary filmmaking, the voice over, or narrator's voice, is typically recorded during post-production. Rarely do the film's subjects hear the voice overs before release.
Leila had hosted Makboul in her home, seated her at her family’s table, and took her through the alleys of Shatila refugee camp. It is unlikely Khaled knew how Makboul would later describe her as a "terrorist" in her voice narration.
Makboul admits in the voice over that Leila Khaled is no longer her role model.
She says she matured and came to see the people on those planes as innocent civilians returning from holidays, believing that Khaled contributed to tarnishing the Palestinian image.
Her stated reason for making the film is “curiosity.” However, as the film unfolds, it becomes clear that her aim extends beyond curiosity toward dismantling the role model that once guided her, both for herself and her viewers.
It’s not standard practice for documentary filmmakers to reveal their personal feelings about the subjects they film. Yet when a film centers on a specific individual, whose private life is laid bare, ethical dilemmas arise.
The core issue emerges when filmmakers conceal their critical stance while projecting empathy, depriving the subject of informed consent to appear in a film that may ultimately stand against them.
A missing house
Lina Makboul’s journey doesn't end with filming Leila in Amman and Shatila camp, where she joins a demonstration and visit her old comrade from the Popular Front. Makboul also travels into historic Palestine, speaking with the pilots and passengers of the hijacked planes.
Before meeting the pilot whose evasive maneuver had led to Leila's arrest and her comrade's death, Makboul asks Leila if she had a message for him. Leila is puzzled by the question, just as she had been earlier when the filmmaker commented on Palestinians being “too serious,” and lacking dark humor about their ongoing catastrophe.
Leila questions what it meant to joke about a people’s catastrophe and the loss of their homeland.
Unmoved, she brushes the question aside. No message. There’s nothing personal between them that warrants contact.
Yet Makboul gives the Israeli pilot ample space to speak directly to a European audience, “debunking” what he calls Palestinian myths of dispossession. He claims Palestinians left their homes voluntarily and became terrorists. He also denies Leila and her comrades the very identity of freedom fighters. After all, he argues, “freedom fighters don’t smuggle guns onto planes.”
On that same visit to 1948-occupied Palestine, Makboul goes to Haifa—Leila's birthplace—from which she was displaced at age four. In a seemingly generous gesture, she finds Leila's childhood home, now abandoned and on the verge of collapse. She returns to Amman with a piece of tile and a stone from the house as a gift to Leila, who had long dreamed of returning.
Makboul jokes that she couldn’t bring back the house itself, as if unaware that Palestinians don’t joke much about lost homes. When Leila sees the tile and stone, she breaks down in tears.
The Palestinian filmmaker, with a house and life in Sweden, cannot grasp why Leila and millions like her cling so stubbornly to the dream of return. She asks how Leila would even want to go back to a home that is falling apart.
Leila's response is simple, "It’s not about the house. It’s about the homeland. A house can fall. We can build another. That’s not the issue. What matters is that we return."
Khaled speaks softly, yet her inner rage toward those who live safely in homes that are not theirs is palpable. She seems to accept this bitterness, using it as a fuel to defend her cause.
In Leila's case, this is pure Palestinian rage, indelible and always transforming into action.
The world knows Christ's commandment to "love your enemies" cannot stand without justice. The oppressed cannot help but hate their oppressors. Yet, those in power and those who rob others of their rights are quick to condemn such hatred, fearing it may one day become a rising force against them.
That’s why “Love your enemies” is perhaps their favorite biblical verse—and often their only connection to the values Christ preached.
Face of a woman
Leila recalls how, as a woman, reporters used to ask her if she had a boyfriend, had ever been in love, or if she's had sex. These weren’t simply voyeuristic questions driven by curiosity about a famous woman’s intimate life.
More profoundly, they were rooted in a view of her as something subhuman—a wild creature. As if, had she ever loved or slept with someone, it might have “cleansed” her of hatred and rage.
Makboul doesn’t escape this gendered gaze either. Despite being a woman of Palestinian origin herself, she stands before someone she sees as a terrorist, stripping her of her humanity, even as she seems, on the surface, to search for it.
She finds it strange, for example, that Leila never worried about losing her beauty before undergoing the facial surgery that changed her looks after the hijackings. As if physical beauty should preoccupy someone heading into a near-suicidal mission. She even reminds Leila that Che Guevara—the revolutionary whose name her group once carried—had lovers in every city.
Why, then, doesn’t Leila live a similar life?
This dynamic mirrors Israel’s strategy of portraying Palestinians as subhuman, savage, and uncivilized. It also echoes the colonial narrative found in countless American films depicting Vietnamese, Cuban, Chinese, Muslim, and Indigenous people as less than human.
I watched Makboul’s film when it was first released, and revisited it again recently. Both times, the same impression lingered: the director is unsettled in Leila’s presence, avoiding her gaze. Something in her demeanor reveals the unease of confronting a former idol. In fact, she admits in her voice over that there’s one particular question she’s wanted to ask, but hasn’t dared to.
Perhaps she felt guilt or shame. Born in Sweden, her life was far more comfortable compared to most Palestinians, including Leila, who had known displacement and exile since childhood. In the end, Makboul finds a solution, equating herself with Leila.
Not just as two Palestinian women seeking the liberation of Palestine, though we never learn how she pursues that goal, but as two women leading relatively comfortable lives today.
Leila grills meat in her spacious Amman home. Her son smokes Marlboro cigarettes as she walks her dog. Working from a large office affiliated with the Palestinian National Council, she checks peaceful flights to Beirut unlikely to get hijacked.
On the other end of the spectrum, her former comrade lives alone in a dilapidated house in Shatila.
Back in Sweden, as she edits the film, Makboul remains haunted by the question she dared not to ask face-to-face. So, in the final scene, shielded by the safe distance, she calls Leila.
In broken Palestinian Arabic, she stammers, "Leila... from the moment we began this film, I've been wanting to ask you something... but I was embarrassed. When you boarded the plane... didn’t you think... that maybe... this operation would tarnish the reputation of the Palestinian people?"
The film ends. We never hear Leila's answer. Only a folk-dance melody plays over the closing credits. And so, the final word is the accusation: "tarnishing the reputation" of Palestinians.
To some, Palestine exists only as an abstract, a romanticized past. For it to remain only a dream, its people must stay subdued, feel no anger, no hatred. They must be crushed.
A version of this article first appeared in Arabic on July 16, 2024