We were flying from Tel Aviv to New York on a September day in 1970. I had turned twelve in June, and my sister Catherine would turn fourteen in December. We were flying alone because our mother lived in Israel and our father lived in America. We boarded at six o’clock in the morning, but instead of landing in New York that evening, we ended up as hostages in a desert in Jordan. Our plane was one among several hijacked by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in the most spectacular episode of air piracy the world had yet seen. My sister and I were among those held inside the plane for six nights and six days. After we came home, there was no debriefing by authorities. No teacher sent us to a school guidance counsellor, and no one took us to a therapist. Our parents never told us what it was like for them. My best friend wanted to know everything, but I didn’t want to talk about it
I kept on flying, shrugging off my unease. My sister and I went back to Israel the next summer. In high school, I flew to Poland on a choral tour. In college, I flew to London to begin a five-month solo backpacking trip. I flew to Paris and Rome during graduate school to visit friends, and to Madrid to join my mother on tour with a dance company. When I got a job in California, I flew back and forth to New York several times a year. When I got a job back in New York, I flew often to Los Angeles to visit my in-laws. Researching books and delivering lectures, I flew around the United States, to the Caribbean, Great Britain, Europe, Australia.
Then came 9/11. That’s when memories of the hijacking began to intrude: the unsettling moment when it all began, the weapons surrounding me, the worry that I might never get home.
For the first time ever, I wanted to know what happened to me when I was twelve years old, travelling with my sister, hijacked and held hostage. I wanted to know what happened up in the air, when we landed, and inside the plane stranded in the desert. I wanted to know what I couldn’t remember and all that I was unaware of at the time. I wanted to connect the twelve-year-old girl who buried as much as she could to the grownup struggling to understand what happened to that girl.
Telling the stories of our own lives, how can we answer the questions we think to ask later on, after the passage of so much time? I dug further into my own memories, and I put my memories together with Catherine’s. I studied airline and government archives, read news coverage, and watched television broadcasts. I read the manifestos of my captors and listened to their narratives, past and present. I met and conversed with fellow-hostages.
The question loomed: Why did I remember so little? Strikingly missing from my own memories of the hijacking was a sense of fear that seemed suitable to the circumstances. Had I ever felt afraid? I couldn’t remember. Could reconstructing the hijacking recover feelings that had been lost to me?
I had submerged the hijacking so deeply that it felt nearly unreal, except for a single, persistent intimation. It would begin with an uncharacteristic procrastination around making an airline reservation, followed by sustained anxiety throughout the task, the completion of which signalled a commitment to board a plane. Entering an airport always—always—had me choking back tears, as did the sound of wheels hitting a runway. I held back every time, afraid that, without such vigilance, there would be no end to the tears. For her part, Catherine rarely flew at all. Across the decades, I had mastered the skill of not thinking about the origins of any of that.
The author at her mother’s apartment building in Tel Aviv, during the summer of the hijacking.Photograph courtesy the author
I remember that the sky over Tel Aviv was bright and cloudless. In the narrow Boeing 707, a single aisle divided two rows of three seats each. Somewhere in the nonsmoking section near the front of tourist class, Catherine and I settled in. My sister took the middle seat, next to an elderly woman. The window seat was mine.
Writing in script with curlicue capitals, I recorded the number of our flight (T.W.A. 741), the time of our departure (6 A.M.), and where the plane would stop before landing in New York (Athens, then Frankfurt). We had taken the exact same flight home from Israel the previous summer—same number, same time, same stopovers—and a calamity ensued. Catherine and I lost track of time in the Frankfurt airport and missed the connecting flight to New York. “Darlings,” my mother wrote, “I was very, very upset to get your father’s letter.”
Recalling that mishap, I wrote in my diary, “This whole flight is jinxed!” This time, though, we safely reboarded. Takeoff from Frankfurt was right on schedule, at 11:02 A.M. Less than an hour later, as we soared over Belgium, the captain announced an altitude of twenty-eight thousand feet, with Brussels visible on the left. The purser was selling headsets for the movie. The stewardesses were taking meal orders and selling drinks.
I heard a commotion: shouting that sounded angry, words I didn’t understand. A woman ran up the aisle. A man followed, both of them shouting. Some passengers thought a husband and wife were having a violent argument, others that the woman was airsick, running to the bathroom to vomit. I saw only a blur, but Catherine saw the man’s gun. Others saw the nickel-plated revolver, too, along with the woman’s finger inserted through the ring of a hand grenade.
Clutching her heart, the old lady in our row moaned, “My pills! My pills!,” prompting Catherine to rummage through the woman’s handbag.
Just in front of the curtain that led to the first-class cabin, the man and woman turned to face the passengers, shouting “Hijack!”
The word “hijack,” I knew, was nearly synonymous with Cuba, referring to American protesters or Cuban exiles seizing airplanes as stunts or pranks. Just that summer, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” had recorded a comedy sketch of crew and hijacker wisecracking together in a cockpit, and even the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, had joked about hijacking. Maybe we would take a Caribbean detour—everyone knew about inconvenienced fliers compensated with lavish dinners and Cuban cigars in fancy hotels.
“Where are we going?” passengers pleaded with the cabin crew. “What’s going to happen to us?” A stewardess, smiling and speaking calmly, said there were two people in the cockpit speaking with the captain. All around Catherine and me, passengers scanned the seat-pocket route maps, wondering, Morocco? Algeria? Some noted the position of the sun and identified the landmasses and waters below: Italy’s Apennine Mountains, the shimmering Aegean. We were heading east, and a passenger who was himself a pilot confirmed that the aircraft was also flying south.
Soon a woman’s voice came over the loudspeaker, which I recorded this way in my diary: “Good afternoon ladies & gentlemen. I am the new pilot who has taken command of your TWA flight. Keep calm. Please cooperate and put your hands behind your head.” Catherine and I copied the other passengers, raising arms and lacing fingers. I wondered why the woman didn’t tell us to put our hands over our heads, the way robbers did. But she wasn’t trying to prevent the passengers from drawing weapons; instead, she needed all of us to brace for impact, in case something went wrong in the cockpit. I begged God to save my life and Catherine’s. What would my father do if we didn’t come home?
A stewardess came by and, without explanation, shepherded Catherine and me into an empty first-class row. Catherine let me take the window as usual, this time with the added incentive to shield her younger sister from any activity in and around the cockpit. The wide cushions felt like beds to two girls who had awakened before sunrise on a morning now incalculably far away. Right before I fell asleep, I saw it: the co-pilot, his naturally kind face wearing an expression of suffering and solemn resignation, emerging from the cockpit with his hands up and the barrel of a gun against his neck. It was one of the very few images from the hijacking that would remain fixed in my mind for the rest of my life.
Some five hours later, a second loudspeaker announcement awakened me. Again the woman identified herself as our new pilot, and again she instructed us to place our hands behind our heads, this time in preparation for a potentially dangerous landing. She didn’t name our destination, but she said the words “friendly country” and “friendly people.”
Behind the cockpit door, the captain faced the challenge of landing an aircraft in unknown territory, in rapidly falling darkness. Below, some sort of runway came into view, dimly lit with vehicle headlights and what looked like flares or smudge pots. Miniature trucks and figures moved about. The landing was a “greaser”: very smooth, with no damage to the aircraft. Local time was 6:40 P.M., about a quarter hour before sunset.
I let Catherine appraise the situation. Leaning past me, she peered out the window at billows of dust and sand, which looked like smoke. Commandos on the ground had fashioned a makeshift runway by lining up barrels filled with sand and diesel-soaked rags, and the blazing torches lit up people in military uniforms with rifles and machine guns, which made it look like a war. Crew and passengers were relieved to be on solid ground, but the absence of real runway lights and airport-terminal buildings was unsettling.
If fear filled the inside of the plane, outside there was a celebration. A crowd clapped, waved, and cheered euphorically. They sang, danced, and fired weapons into the air. Someone propped a ladder from the back of a truck up to the plane’s front exit. The man and woman who had taken over our flight climbed down, triumphant heroes welcomed by their comrades, melting into the outdoor throng. People dressed in fatigues in turn ascended the ladder, armed with flashlights and rifles, lanterns and machine guns. Some were boys who appeared to be no more than fourteen or fifteen years old, and some were young women with short hair. Claiming the first-class section as their headquarters, the commandos ordered Catherine and me back to tourist class.
Listening to my captors, I absorbed both apology and explanation. A woman dressed in an army uniform introduced herself as Hallah Joseph. She said that we were “safe and welcome” in the country of Jordan, and that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine regretted the inconvenience they had caused us. A man named Bassam Abu Sharif was sorry, too, that the Popular Front had hijacked us. I liked apologies, especially from grownups who made children sad. Abu Sharif explained his organization’s motives, speaking about liberating his country from occupation by Israel, and talked about the strategy of exchanging all of us for Palestinians imprisoned in Israel and in other countries. Unable to make sense of a history I didn’t know, I translated his words to myself only as We’re sorry to trouble you, but we hope you understand our point.
Six summers in Israel, and Catherine and I knew nothing about the people who lived on the land when the nation was founded. When my mother took us to visit friends in the artist’s colony of Ein Hod, I had no idea that the hundreds of Palestinians there in 1948 had been exiled to refugee camps, the village soon resettled by Israeli artists. “Painters, printers, and sculptors live there in quaint little Arab style houses,” Catherine wrote in a letter to our father, enraptured, and also entirely unaware of the history she was describing.
Return to the Palestinian homeland: that was the goal of the Popular Front, including “every piece of land, every rock and stone.” Members held childhood or young-adult memories of the two wars that made refugees of their families, but Zionism was not the only enemy; so, too, were anti-Arab imperialism and reactionary Arab governments. Our captors envisioned a single secular, pluralistic, humanistic democracy in which Christians, Jews, and Muslims all enjoyed full and equal rights of citizenship. Just a few months earlier, the head of the Popular Front had told a Beirut newspaper that his movement was not “hostile to the Jews as Jews,” and did not “aim at annihilating them or throwing them into the sea.” As the Front further explained, “We always make a distinction between Jews and Zionists; we harbor no hostility to the Jews but we shall fight the Zionists because they invaded and occupied our homeland.” As Marxist-Leninists, they extolled peasants and the working classes, even though their leadership came from the ranks of doctors, lawyers, and intellectuals. The Western press mocked the Popular Front as “bourgeois intellectual revolutionaries,” but the refugee camps of Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria provided fertile ground for the organization’s growing membership.