Leila Khaled, 80 years old, has been fighting for the liberation of Palestine since she was fourteen. She grew up as a refugee in Lebanon and joined the resistance at a young age. She is a well-known freedom fighter in the Palestinian movement, especially known for being the first woman to hijack a plane in 1969. Khaled did most of her resistance work with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), moving between countries to pursue her cause, until she settled in Jordan after getting married in 1992. When Mondoweiss met her in Amman, she had just returned from Venezuela, where she attended a conference on Palestine – her work for liberation is still ongoing.
Mondoweiss: You joined the Arab Nationalist Movement, which the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) later derived from, when you were 14 years old. Why did you decide to join them?
LK: The feeling of deprivation and injustice makes you take a stance: either you accept it or you reject it. I rejected it. Since I was young, we were deprived of things that were once available to us in Palestine. When we arrived in Lebanon, we saw people who had been displaced, walking from Palestine to Lebanon, each one carrying their children or belongings, and everyone was crying, men, women, and my mother was crying too, and so were we. We arrived at my uncle’s house and around it, there were orange trees. We wanted to eat them, but my mother said no: “This is not yours. what is yours, is in Haifa, in Palestine. We do not have anything here.”
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