Leila Khaled: Icon of Palestinian Liberation, by Sarah Irving (Pluto Press 2012)
Leila Khaled: Icon of Palestinian Liberation, by Sarah Irving (Pluto Press 2012)
Review by Tali Janner-Klausner, lilithlaughed.co.uk/?p=126
The photograph that featured under many headlines after the 1969 hijacking. The ring on her finger is made of a grenade pin and a bullet.
Female revolutionaries with as high a profile as Palestinian militant Leila Khaled are thin on the ground. In this short but thorough study, English writer and Palestine solidarity activist Sarah Irving attempts to “tread that fine line” between focusing on Khaled as an inspirational person whose life can “teach us about personal paths through political struggle”, and avoiding holding her up as an exceptional hero.
She succeeds in this through diligent historicisation and attention to ethical ambiguities. This book is not a hagiographical account of an individual’s endeavours, but a nuanced historical biography based on thorough historical research together with extensive interviews with Leila Khaled and those close to her. In this way, Khaled is the figure around whom the book is structured, but much of the content is not directly about her. Rather, her life story functions as a crucible through which to explore the history of the Palestinian diaspora and resistance, including issues of: women in the Palestinian resistance struggle; divisions within the Palestinian and Pan-Arab nationalist movements; ethical and tactical questions around strategies for resistance, and the relationship with international media and politics. This is particularly useful considering the surprising dearth of scholarship on Palestinian factional politics and militant figures.
Born in Haifa in 1944, Leila Khaled’s family fled the war in 1948 and she grew up in a refugee camp in Lebanon. By 16 she was training as a militant and has been active in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) since then – whether fighting the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the late 1970s or as a politician travelling the world to speak at conferences, as she does today. She is best known for her involvement in aeroplane hijackings. In 1969, 25 year old Khaled took part in a successful aeroplane hijacking organised by the PFLP to draw attention to the violence and dispossession faced by millions of Palestinians, just two months after Israeli PM Golda Meir had claimed that there was no such thing as the Palestinian people. They redirected the flight to Damascus and blew up the aeroplane once the passengers had disembarked. She went through intense plastic surgery to avoid recognition, and the next year she attempted to hijack another flight. Her partner was shot dead and she was arrested and taken to prison in London, but released months later in a prisoner exchange.
Irving explores the difficult relationship between Palestinian resistance and the international media, and how the hijackings have become emblematic in the debate about tactics, ethics, and “terrorism”. In these interviews, Khaled stresses how important it was to her not to hurt people on the flights, and that hijacking was an necessary tactic at the time, not a heroic act. She distances herself from the practices of Islamist factions and suicide bombers, but with nuance and a call to understand the factors that push people to such extremes.
As well as this, Leila Khaled has had a different kind of attention from media, politics and popular culture than her male equivalents. Sexism means that women are seen in relation to men, so if a woman has a dramatic and active role in what is considered a masculine domain, her gender becomes the talking point. Although the hijackings certainly brought increased attention to the Palestinian cause, headlines were about the surprise of a beautiful female militant, rather than the reasons for her taking such dramatic action. She has undoubtedly brought strength and inspiration to countless women, Palestinians and others, in situations where we face difficulties or are seen as unfit for task just because of our gender. However, Khaled worries that she may be seen as exceptional – an icon, but perhaps not something that ordinary women can aspire to. She is well aware of the many problems of a high profile, and took on the role reluctantly, only because of the benefit to the PFLP of having an articulate and iconic media representative.
In a fascinating chapter on “Revolutionary Women”, Irving explores the complicated relationship between gender justice and national struggle. Leila Khaled’s relationship with women’s liberation movements has been complicated.
Some pacifist western feminists have made similar assumptions to those of the mainstream media, that militancy is an inherently male practice, and then argued that Khaled is ‘selling out to patriarchy’ by adopting violent tactics. Whatever your stance on the ethics or efficacy of armed struggle, to see Khaled as betraying her essential femininity by taking up arms seems absurd, even condescending.
Khaled has also been criticised for taking part in a mixed-gender nationalist movement which has not made feminism a priority. This is a more serious debate than whether militant tactics are inherently anti-feminist, but on the extreme on of this debate, arguments that Khaled is selling out her interests to men still impose a narrow view 
of what meaningful feminist resistance can be. Khaled stresses that all genders suffer through the violence of occupation and dispossession, and entreaties: “who is the greater oppressor – a father who says no you can’t marry this man, or the occupier who takes your land, forces you to flee or live under occupation, and perpetrates incredible range of human rights abuses”. But she need not see the issues as separate – in fact, her own life and actions are testament to how the two are inextractable.
Leila Khaled was initially reluctant to be involved in the women’s movement. She said that she struggles for all Palestinians, not just women, and when the PFLP leadership wanted her to represent them in the Union of Palestinian Woman, she was reluctant. However she did take up the job after pressure from the party, and in time, became enthusiastic. She said that this role opened her eyes to how the occupation and the situation of refugees affected women in different ways to how they affected men, and to the many social problems that Palestinian women had to face but which never held any man back. She has dealt with the implications of being a woman in a national liberation movement – to be accepted in military training camps, women like her had to imitate men and were often undermined by their male colleagues. She moved from wanting to prove that women could be equal to men, to understanding that women are equal to men in our abilities, but have life experiences that hold us back, because of sexism in the society around us.
This was not simply a theoretical problem in the Palestinian resistance movement. In the 1980s, after the PFLP moved from Lebanon to Palestine and Jordan, more female resistance fighters had children, because they were no longer on the front lines. They campaigned to change the structures of the PFLP to provide them with support. To continue to be active, they needed childcare provisions. The stories and discussions in the book demonstrate that feminism is part of every liberation struggle, and crucial to Leila Khaled’s dreams of freedom and dignity in Palestine.
Leila Khaled in 2009
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. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/jan/26/israel
. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leila_Khaled
. http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/07-04-17-leila-khaled-palestinian-fighte.html