eila Khaled is the first known woman to lead an airplane hijacking. Her portrait as a young woman, smiling and holding an AK-47, became a symbol of the Palestinian liberation struggle. Born in Haifa in 1944, she became a refugee during the , or ‘catastrophe’, of 1948, which resulted in the dispossession of an estimated 750,000 refugees and destruction of hundreds of villages and towns with the founding of the state of Israel. Khaled has been able to see Haifa only once more during her life – in 1969, when, as a member of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, she hijacked a plane and told the pilot to
