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Overview
In this intimate profile, based on interviews with Khaled and those who know her, Sarah Irving gives us the life-story behind the image. Key moments of Khaled's turbulent life are explored, including the dramatic events of the hijackings, her involvement in the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (a radical element within the PLO), her opposition to the Oslo peace process and her activism today.
Leila Khaled's example gives unique insights into the Palestinian struggle through one remarkable life – from the tension between armed and political struggle, to the decline of the secular left and the rise of Hamas, and the role of women in a largely male movement.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745329512 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 05/16/2012 |
| Series: | Revolutionary Lives |
| Pages: | 168 |
| Sales rank: | 234,212 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.90(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Haifa, Lebanon, Kuwait
Leila Khaled was born on April 9, 1944 in the port city of Haifa. Her family were comfortable, members of the lower middle class. Her father, Ali Khaled, was a café owner, running a business he had built up over 20 years, and her mother looked after the growing family. She was the sixth child of an eventual dozen, the last of whom, her brother Nasser, was not born until 12 years later, when the family were refugees in the town of Tyre (Sour) in Lebanon.
Modern-day Haifa is often held up by Israel, in its efforts to demonstrate its multi-ethnic credentials to a Western audience, as a model of Arab-Jewish co-existence. Like many cities in Palestine it has a long history of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities living side-by-side in some degree of harmony; whilst on one hand modern Haifa is home to a vibrant Palestinian cultural life and a number of joint Palestinian-Jewish projects, on the other its contemporary Palestinian population is subject to the same social and economic discrimination and political marginalization as other "Arab Israelis." In 1854 Haifa had a small Jewish community (32 of its 2,012 residents), while 1,200 were Muslim and the remainder Christians — mainly of the Orthodox denomination to which most Palestinian Christians historically belong, but also a small number of Catholics and Protestants.
In 1911 Haifa was still "predominantly Arab," but Jewish settlements started to grow in the area by the early 1920s, several of them funded by the Jewish National Fund and by American Zionist organizations. By 1929, tensions throughout Palestine, spurred by increasing Zionist settlement and a deteriorating global economic situation, led the British Mandate authorities to fear that Haifa was one of the towns where attacks on Jewish and British targets might happen. During the Great Arab Revolt of 1936–9 against the British Mandate authorities and Zionist immigration, Haifa's Palestinian and Jewish residents were driven further apart: in July 1938 two Jewish terrorist bombs killed over 60 Palestinians, while Arab employees of Jewish companies and several Jews were wounded or killed by Palestinians.
From the small town of about 2,000 people in the 1850s, Haifa had become a major city. The British Mandate authorities had developed it in preference to the ancient port of Akka and it was the final point of an oil pipeline which carried Iraqi oil for export to Europe and of a spur of the Hejaz railway which linked it to Damascus. As a prosperous urban center, it attracted large numbers of Jewish immigrants during the 1930s, as well as a substantial Palestinian middle class who later, as refugees, played a large role in building up cities such as Amman as major cultural and economic centers in the Middle East.
But by 1946 the animosity between the new Jewish communities in Palestine and the Palestinian inhabitants was starting to be felt in Haifa. In 1946 the Palmach, an underground Jewish militia, attacked the train yards in Haifa, resulting in major reprisals by the British Mandate authorities and the arrest of 3,000 Zionist activists across Palestine. By late 1947 the Irgun, another Zionist armed force, had started to attack Arab villages around Haifa and Arab supporters had started to retaliate with attacks on Jewish areas. The Palestinian population was nervous of the large Jewish contingent in the area; they felt cut off from other major Arab towns and hemmed in by a growing circle of Jewish settler towns and kibbutzim. Hearing the news of violence across the rest of Palestine — including the April 9 massacre at Deir Yassin — the Khaled family fled on April 13, 1948.
As the situation across Palestine spiraled out of control in April 1948, Haifa descended into confusion. British forces withdrew to the port area on April 21 and within 48 hours the Haganah — the military force which later became the Israeli army — had taken the city. What happened then is a subject of debate: the Palestinian chief magistrate and militia commander had left on the first night of attack to "seek reinforcements," but apparently never returned. On April 22 the local Arab leadership told the population to stay, as did the Jewish mayor, but the Arab High Command in Damascus told them to flee because they were planning to bomb the Jewish forces. The local Arab leadership changed its mind and told its people to leave and many fled, spurred on by "rough treatment" from the Irgun and Haganah, including forcible evictions, house to house searches, detentions and beatings. By May 1st only 3–4,000 Palestinians were left in Haifa.
Despite the growing tensions between Palestinians and Jews in Haifa, Leila Khaled's memories and autobiography record a happy beginning to her childhood, with fairly liberal and indulgent parents who allowed the high-spirited child to run her own writ. Khaled insists that one of her early memories is of a Jewish friend, a little girl called Tamara, who still features in Khaled's talks about her life and her feelings about relations between Jews and Muslims. She also records that her family's relations with the inhabitants of the nearby Jewish quarter of Haifa, Hadar, were fairly cordial until November 1947, when tensions increased after the UN partitioning of Palestine and Israel. "The turning-point in my relationship with Tamara," wrote Khaled in 1973, "came on November 29, 1947, when the UN partitioned Palestine between Tamara and me. Tamara was awarded 56% of my land. I was expected to accede to this demand and congratulate Tamara's people."
Khaled's family fled Haifa when she was just four, so her memories are vague, she says, and they quickly degenerate into a child's hazy recollections of unrest and confusion. "I was too young, but I do remember some little things," she says. "I remember a staircase, because when there were clashes on the street in the area we used to run and crouch under it. It was wooden and there was a banister. And once there was no electricity and one of our relatives came and told my mother there was a curfew and I was wondering, what is a curfew? I thought that the cut off electricity was the curfew. I used to say it in a crooked way and everybody was laughing at me."
And in memories which would resonate with later events, Khaled already noted that "all the time we were afraid, especially because my father was often not at home and sometimes I heard him coming in late at night and then going. I don't even remember how he was at that time."
Since 1948, the 9th of April, Leila Khaled's birthday, has been held as a day of mourning by the Palestinian people. On this date, over a hundred of the 750 inhabitants of the village of Deir Yassin, outside Jerusalem, were massacred by members of the Irgun and Stern Gang, militias whose bloody bombings and campaign of violence against Palestinian communities include some of the most shameful episodes in the story of the establishment of the State of Israel. In her 1973 autobiography, Khaled records that her birthday was never celebrated after she turned four. She also wrote that on April 11 she saw her first dead body: "I do remember being terrified, but I do not remember whether the dead person was Arab or Jew. I only remember hearing bombs exploding and seeing the blood spurting from the dying man's stomach. I hid under the staircase and stared at the corpse in the street outside. I trembled and wondered whether this would be the fate of my father."
Leila Khaled's mother and siblings were amongst some of the earlier Palestinians to flee Haifa, on April 13, 1948 (just four days after Leila's fourth birthday), after several days of shooting and shelling in the city. Her mother had hired a car to take them to an uncle's house in Tyre, but tried to hang on as long as possible in the hope that they would not have to leave. The departure was also delayed when her mother tried to help move the body of another man killed by the shelling in front of their house. When the time finally came to go, Leila herself had to be dragged out from her hiding-place under the stairs by one of her sisters.
"I remember the kitchen and that I loved dates," Khaled recalls. "My father had bought us a big round basket of dates. My mother said we had to go to Lebanon, and we used to go every year to Lebanon so that's not unusual. But when they were ready to go my mother counted us and found somebody missing. It was me. I was hiding under the staircase and I heard my mother and the neighbors calling and I didn't answer. The car was waiting and someone found me in the little space by the door, hiding with the basket of dates." She was, she remembers, afraid that the dates would be left behind.
But the child Leila's fear for her basket of fruit saved the family's life. The car which had left without them as she hid was shelled just a short distance down the road and two small girls were killed. "Don't scream at Leila," the neighbors told her mother, "she saved your lives." But the second time they tried to leave, Leila's mother made sure that she was the first to be taken out to the car, carrying her baby sister. One of her older brothers had already gone ahead to Beirut. The child Leila "was crying because my mother was crying. Before when we were preparing to go to Lebanon we were happy, but this time everybody was crying."
Khaled also recalls that her mother later told her that one of their neighbors, a Jewish woman, urged them not to leave and invited them to stay in her house until it was safe. But, she says, "At that time the Deir Yassin massacre was in everybody's mind and so everybody was afraid of other massacres. I think the Zionists spread rumors to exaggerate it to make people afraid."
"All the way from Haifa we were stuffed in the car," Leila Khaled remembers. The journey was short — less than two hours, she thinks. But they witnessed other refugees walking the long distance into exile, and Khaled's father wasn't with the family. He had apparently stayed in Haifa, intending to keep his home and business and to invite his family back once the bloodshed was over. But on April 22 both house and shop were seized. He later joined the Palestinian resistance and, in the wake of the Arab defeat, was sent to Gaza and then Egypt before finally making his way back to his family a year later.
Of their first months in Lebanon, Khaled records that she "recall[s] nothing besides accompanying my older sisters Nawal, Zakiah and Rahaab to the United Nations Relief & Works Agency (UNRWA) provision bureau to collect our miserable rations. My sisters were humiliated; my mother was angry."
The family spent nearly a year in Tyre, a time Leila Khaled remembers as one of exile and dispossession. She told Eileen MacDonald that: "my uncle's house was surrounded by a large garden with lots of orange trees. As children at home we had always picked our oranges when we were hungry. My mother slapped our hands and said those oranges are not yours and you are not allowed to eat them. Since then, I haven't been able to eat oranges. It brings such a feeling of sadness to me to see them and to think that our orange trees are still there in Haifa, but now they belong to somebody else."
Leila Khaled acknowledges that her family was better off than the majority of Palestinian refugees. They had relatives to stay with in Tyre and were spared some of the worst experiences of those who had nowhere to go but the UNRWA camps. But, she says, it was still a difficult transition from the comfortable conditions of her first four years, and this laid the foundations for the politicization of her teens.
"At home, Palestinian families were in a miserable state," she says. "Whatever we asked for was rejected by our parents, especially our mother, because our father often wasn't there. Whenever we asked 'why?' the answer was: because you are not in Palestine. All the deprivation we lived in, it was because we 'are not in Palestine.' When we grew up this idea became politicized — that we won't have anything unless we return to Palestine. So the idea of return began at home because it was the answer for everything, and we had to know why it happened this way and who was responsible. Sometimes people accused us of leaving our homes just because we are afraid and there were even rumors that some Palestinians sold their land, and that was humiliating for us."
The stain of the accusation that they had sold their homes to the Israelis and fled was one which, Khaled recounts, lasted for decades. In 1982, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Khaled was working with one of the Palestinian women's organizations which tried to find housing and supplies for the refugees who fled north to the sectarian hell that was Beirut.
"I went into an empty building, a new one, in Beirut and I heard a woman telling another one, 'you see now why we left our homes? For years and years you were telling us that we sold our lands and homes.' I entered and asked what they were discussing. There was a woman sitting there with her children and another woman sitting here with her children, one Palestinian and the other Lebanese. And the Palestinian woman was saying, like she wanted to retaliate, 'see how people are made to live?' She said this woman had been saying for 20 or 30 years that the Palestinians got what they deserved because they sold their land, that she made us feel guilty, that every Palestinian should feel guilty for running away."
* * *
A bright, "boyish and aggressive" child, Khaled was soon sent to kindergarten to keep her out of trouble. It was, she describes in her 1973 autobiography, largely a "babysitting affair," where the only structured activity was learning to recite the Holy Koran. She progressed at the age of six to the Evangelical Churches' School for the Palestinians, a charity school where she rebelled against being put in the first grade because of her poor English (instead of the second year, which her age warranted). With typical bravado, she considered her skills in Arabic and mathematics to warrant being put up to grade four.
Leila Khaled's introduction to formal Arab nationalist politics came via her older brothers and sisters. Six of the boys and girls in the Khaled family became involved with the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), the organization founded by George Habash and Wadi'a Haddad while they were students at the American University of Beirut (AUB).
"My oldest brother was studying at AUB, where all the leaders of the ANM were studying" recalls Khaled. "And in our families the oldest boy has the same authority as the father and has a special status, and within the ANM it was believed that every member of the Movement should influence his family first, so my brother influenced my two older sisters and my other brother who was two years older than me. Then my sisters influenced me." She was only eight years old when Mohammed, her 17-year-old eldest brother, started debating politics with his father, exciting the little Leila. Gradually, she began to realize that there were larger forces behind the fact that she and her friends had to go to school in the big, draughty tent which housed the first two grades at the Union of Evangelical Churches School for Palestinians. In December 1952 a winter storm blew the tent over, injuring several children and terrifying the rest.
Politicization on the subject of Palestinian dispossession was one thing, but applying its lessons to other injustices was initially beyond her. Being beaten in class by Samirah, a "scum of earth" girl from a refugee camp, was another turning point. When nine-year-old Leila was caught bullying the camp girl, their teacher lectured her on the fact that the peasants eking out an existence in the camps were the "real" Palestinians, who had been connected to the land for centuries, unlike her own middle-class urban parents. For the Khaled family themselves, conditions were slowly improving and in 1955, when Leila was 11, they moved into a three-room apartment and "hunger was no longer a threat."
But, says Khaled, the older Khaled children all remained politically active. "Generally the whole atmosphere at that time was of rising nationalist feeling in the Arab world, especially after Nasser came to power in Egypt." For Leila Khaled, her siblings, and the refugee community surrounding them, the upswing in Arab nationalism was a way out of the sense of helplessness which pervaded their society after the Nakba, or Disaster, as Palestinians call the founding of the State of Israel. The youngest Khaled brother was born in 1956 and named Nasser after the Egyptian president who had faced down the West over the Suez Canal. Later, Khaled joked that "Now the family could either form a soccer team or take on the 'twelve tribes' of Israel. The decision was already made. That autumn was the most exciting period of my childhood."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Leila Khaled"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Sarah Irving.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction1 Haifa, Lebanon, Kuwait
2 Leila The Fighter
3 Black September
4 Marriage And Death
5 Revolutionary Women
6 Moving To Jordan And Returning To Palestine
7 Leila Khaled In The Future, Palestine In The Future
References
Index
