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.
Iremember 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.
Less than an hour after we landed, with the plane’s batteries dead, the only illumination inside the aircraft came from the fiery torches and the glimmering headlights of the trucks outside. Armed men and women walked the aisles and guarded the exits. As if we had arrived at a real airport, the guards distributed landing cards, offering the beams of flashlights by which to write our names and addresses, which Catherine did for both of us. When they instructed everyone to forfeit their passports, Catherine handed over the single booklet we shared. It was in her name, with me listed as a minor. In the single photo we stand side by side, Catherine taller.
Soon a roaring sound pierced the nighttime quiet, deafening thunder rolling across the ground, with no rain following. It turned out to be the landing of another hijacked plane—what sounded like thunder was their captain putting his engines in reverse to avoid crashing into us.
Our stewardesses served dinner and distributed milk and water supplied by our captors, particularly mindful of babies and young children. With an ambulance at the ready, a nice Palestinian doctor from the Red Crescent walked the aisles, inquiring if anyone needed medical attention. The cabin crew, in their double role as hostages and airline staff, set about making everyone as comfortable as possible.
The co-pilot—the man I had seen with a gun held to his neck—stood in the aisle to address the passengers. His face kind and earnest, he told everyone that he didn’t know how long we would be held, but that our captors had promised “no bodily harm.” Quickly I memorized those words, for this was the story I planned to tell everyone when I got home: despite the weapons all around me, I wasn’t afraid because the co-pilot told us right away that we wouldn’t be harmed. A local representative from the International Red Cross, permitted by the commandos to board our plane, implored us not to be afraid, assuring us that he was making contacts for our release.
In another imprinted memory, though, I watch the commandos carry thick yellow cables—the cables in the image may be fabricated—the faces of the men expressionless as they go about their task. Although I determine somehow that this is dynamite, there’s no memory of accompanying emotion, only the sense of a child intently watching every move.
Dawn seeped into the airplane. Was yesterday a dream?
No. We had slept on the plane. Sand stretched into an unforgiving distance, a flat landscape, dry and cracked. People marvelled at the vastness around us. It was Monday, Labor Day at home, the last day of summer for schoolchildren. My friends would be starting seventh grade tomorrow.
One of the hostages had a transistor radio that picked up a signal from the open aircraft door, and another, a college student who spoke Arabic, translated the broadcasts. That was how we learned of two more Sunday hijackings, besides ours and the Swissair jet now parked behind us: an El Al takeover had been foiled in midair, and a Pan American jet had exploded at the Cairo airport as soon as passengers and crew evacuated.
Sometime during that first day, a select group of passengers from both desert planes were allowed to leave, loaded into vans waiting on the desert floor. I watched carefully as a woman wearing a sari passed our row, memorizing her gait and expression in case Catherine and I should next be chosen. She moved purposefully and wore a neutral expression, as if a single wrong twitch might provoke the commandos to send her back to her seat. I would be sure to copy her demeanor if our turn came, and I knew that Catherine, a better actress than I, would do the same.
As the sun began its descent that second night in the desert, I was happy to receive a hot meal: chicken, green beans, and potatoes, along with grapes and bananas. The stewardesses poured hot tea. Then, after dinner on Monday night, I told my diary, came “the most frightening moment.”
I remember the hostages lining up in the plane’s narrow aisle. When it was our turn, a commando sitting behind a makeshift table in the first-class lounge consulted our shared passport. Wearing a serious expression and speaking in clear, clipped English, he asked questions. Are you American? Are you Israeli citizens? Why were you in Israel? Are you Jewish? Catherine spoke for both of us. Yes, we were American. We were not Israeli citizens. We had been visiting our grandparents in Israel. (It was true that our grandparents had moved to Israel a year earlier, and I, standing silently at my big sister’s side, admired her for eliding the fact that we were really in Israel living with our mother, which seemed far more serious.) Yes, she said, we were Jewish.
The commandos ordered some of the hostages off the plane, including Catherine and me, and boarded us onto vans. If we were on our way home, as I hoped, then the whole ordeal would have amounted only to one night and one day. Abruptly and mysteriously, though, the commandos soon ordered the hostages off the vans. We stood huddled together on the desert floor, guards surrounding us in a circle, weapons at their sides. No one seemed to know why any of this was happening, or why they had suddenly changed their minds. The night air was chilly, and I heard whispers among the grownups about concentration camps. I wondered if someone would give an order to shoot.
One of the commandos began to read names from a list. If your name was called, you were to return to the vans, and a ten-year-old Jewish boy could tell that the names were all “non-Jewish.” A fourteen-year-old girl likewise realized that “those of us who were Jewish were detained, and most of the rest were sent onward.”
In the press and among politicians, a streamlined story about Monday night prevailed. The Washington Post described the Popular Front’s strategy as “to separate their victims into two groups, Jews and non-Jews.” Statements like this were neither entirely untrue nor entirely true, since the commandos had released Jews from the Swissair plane and detained non-Jews on the T.W.A. plane. The Popular Front knew that Israeli citizens “would naturally be more important than any of our other hostages,” because they could most readily be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Problem was, the aborted El Al hijacking meant there were far fewer Israeli hostages than the Front had counted on. Without a sufficient number of Israelis, it seemed the commandos were targeting Americans (as one Popular Front slogan put it, “Israel is America. America is Israel”), and in particular Americans with ties to Israel.
The rest of us—still around a hundred hostages—spread out in tourist class, and by Tuesday the old lady on the aisle had found somewhere else to sit, giving Catherine and me our own row. We entertained ourselves by imitating her heart-clutching cry, My pills! My pills! Our mockery helped interrupt the sense of dread all around us.
From radio reports and from the commandos came information about demands and deadlines and consequences. The Popular Front wanted to exchange their hostages for Palestinians in Switzerland and Germany, imprisoned for recent violent attacks at the Zurich and Munich airports; for the foiled El Al hijacker Leila Khaled, now jailed in Great Britain; and for an unspecified number of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. The countdown began on Monday at 6 a.m. If those deadlines were not met within seventy-two hours, a Front spokesman said, the planes, “including remaining hostages,” would be blown up. The Front would eventually extend the deadline indefinitely but kept their intentions unclear. One commando told a reporter that if they blew up the planes, the hostages would “probably” be moved.
Gathered around a radio on Wednesday, a group of commandos suddenly appeared ecstatic. I watched them embracing and shaking hands, slapping one another on the back, their faces expressing joyous disbelief—this another of the handful of images I retained. Our guards ordered our co-pilot into the cockpit to assist with the landing of another aircraft searching for the desert runway. A dot in the sky became a point, then a plane, then a roaring jet. Their captain made such an expert landing, passing both planes and circling back, that hostages inside our plane cheered. Our T.W.A. jet now stood between two others: the Swissair right behind us and a British B.O.A.C. at a right angle to us.
Armored vehicles, trucks, and jeeps approached the new prey as their hijackers alighted to an enthusiastic welcome: more than a hundred commandos tossing their hats and guns, jumping up and down, dancing. Catherine and I didn’t have a direct view of the commotion from our side of the plane, so we leaned over to peer out the windows across the aisle. When our guards explained that these new hostages would hasten the release of everyone, some felt hopeful, even if we also felt bad for the new arrivals. Passengers on our plane wanted to visit the new hostages, to console them, but our captors refused, and the grownups’ faces around me displayed consternation.
Because it was so hot during the day, male crew members shed jackets, ties, and socks, and the stewardesses wore only the dark-colored sleeveless shifts of their summer uniforms. Women cut off the sleeves of their dresses, and people lost track of their shoes. Then, as night swallowed day, desert temperatures plunged to near freezing, prompting us all to don whatever extra clothing we had, while the crew provided makeshift blankets by slicing and distributing the curtains that divided first class from tourist class. Nighttime’s glacier made us yearn for daytime’s oven. As the sun climbed upward again, our yearnings reversed.
Strong desert winds periodically whipped up dry particles to create rolling sand walls, and twice the sandstorms came, the tan powder clouds pouring inside before anyone could get the exits sealed. The dust entered our eyes and ears, noses and mouths, making it hard to breathe, and when commandos came on board afterward, we saw sand trimming their eyelashes, eyebrows, and beards. Until the storm passed, the plane remained sealed and suffocating.
Fear suppressed appetites, at least at first, which was when meals were most plentiful, since there was still leftover airline food, and the International Red Cross flew in boxed lunches. Pita was the staple provided by our captors, filling and familiar. To go with it, there were hard-boiled eggs (with Bulgarian stamps), tomatoes, cheese, or jam, though soon the bread became “hard as a rock,” I told my diary, and eventually most of the fillings ran out. On occasion there were olives and figs, grapes, apples, bananas, watermelon, and canned corned beef, but as the days went on meals became scarcer and sparser. As I recorded another time, “More bread & water. Oh dear!”
Thirst was a problem, too. Water came from two trucks that the commandos had driven out to the airstrip. At first we got a half cup every two hours, and, when the Red Cross later brought in mineral water, every three hostages shared a single bottle, refilled halfway twice a day.
Early on, mothers contrived diapers out of the first-class cloth napkins and the thin material intended for passengers’ resting heads (Catherine and I counted seven infants and fifteen toddlers on board), while women and older girls contrived sanitary napkins out of cloth supplied by the Palestinian Red Crescent. In place of running water, the commandos filled up large red plastic containers from the water truck parked outside, sweetening it with cheap-smelling perfume. Some of it was to help flush the toilets, but you could also dip in your hands for a semblance of a rinse. Cigarette smoke permeated the cabin as well, as commandos, crew, and passengers, including the teen-agers, lit up without regard for the plane’s nonsmoking section.
Most of our captors were nice to Catherine and me, and we especially liked Hallah Joseph, the head commando on our plane. A good English speaker in her early thirties, she played with the little kids, talked to everybody, and answered everyone’s questions. Most of the male guards were nice to my sister and me, too. One day when Catherine’s diary was resting on her tray table, one of the men spied the heart she had drawn on the back cover, enclosing her name with the name of the Israeli boy she liked that summer. Eyes twinkling, he exclaimed, “Romantic!” Another time one of the commandos caught Catherine wiping away tears. “Don’t cry,” he said in a way that felt fatherly. “We have children, too.”
One of our grownup friends explained that it was the commandos’ job to keep us safe but also to scare us, and Catherine thought they did a good job of keeping us scared. Sometimes they told us that our lives rested in the hands of our governments, that “your government better decide soon,” that our government had forgotten about us, did not care about us. All this made some of the American hostages angry—at the Popular Front, but also at President Richard Nixon for prolonging our captivity. We laughed when we heard one hostage say, “I’m going to go to Washington and kick somebody in the face!”
Catherine and I disliked one particular commando. She was Palestina, named to represent the cause of her people, and other hostages feared her, too. She kept her weapon visible, rarely pointed toward the floor, and walked up and down the aisle making accusations like “You’re an Israeli soldier!” When she guarded the lavatories, Catherine just wouldn’t go (“Oh, the way she looked at you!” my sister remembered). Once, when I came out of the bathroom, Palestina pointed her gun right at me and said, staring coldly, “Now get back to your seat.” I composed my face to display no alarm, making sure to walk slowly enough not to betray any emotion. As a college student sitting in the row behind us explained, “She’s just walking around filled with hate, that’s all.”
When the commandos let us outside the plane, I saw that we were surrounded by machine-gun emplacements, pointing away from the aircraft. Gazing back at our metal quarters, I saw, too, that the commandos had painted the fuselage with the letters “PFLP” in red and black. A slogan was painted in English: “Down with imperialism, Zionism & Israel,” camera-ready for the television crews who travelled out to the desert daily.
A woman commando—one of three on our plane—gave out bottles of warm orange soda, while men used the water truck to hose down the sand to keep it from blowing. Grownups strolled back and forth. Children were keen to run around. When an especially energetic two-year-old wasn’t dunking his hand into a puddle of oil, he tried valiantly to sneak through the legs of the surrounding guards. An older boy, aware of the boundaries, jogged in place. The only desert shade came from the wings of the giant marooned airplanes.
Catherine and I walked with a nineteen-year-old from Brooklyn, who had taken it upon herself to care for unaccompanied children on the plane. She explained that the line visible on the horizon was the Jordanian Army, inside their tanks, which I now understood was a different army from the one to which our captors belonged, and the one at which our captors’ machine guns, wedged in the sand, were pointed.
On the horizon, past the tanks, I saw shimmering water—were we on an island? Others at first thought we were surrounded by lakes, and one of the hostages saw sailboats in the distance. Our Brooklyn friend explained that the water was a mirage. I had learned about mirages in elementary school, and a commando was pointing out the phenomenon to some of the other children, explaining their scientific workings. Other commandos gave piggyback rides to little kids.
One day, sitting in the shade under an airplane wing, someone started a round of John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” which the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary had made into a hit single that year. I knew that the generic ballad about leaving home had become an anthem for young men drafted and sent to Vietnam, uncertain if they would ever return. Loud voices among the singing hostages—I can still see the college student from the row behind us sitting on the sand, grinning—changed the words to “living on a jet plane,” which Catherine and I thought was hilarious, and everyone was laughing as we sang the line “Don’t know when I’ll be back again,” which some people changed to “Can’t wait till I take off again.”
I can see myself, too, sitting under the wing, in my red-and-gold bell-bottoms and long-sleeved white button-down shirt, smiling and singing. I’m not lost in the moment, though, since at the same time I’m composing a narrative in my head, describing the scene to people at home. Not to a lot of people, mainly just to my father, so he will know that we weren’t too sad or afraid. Eventually the merriment proved too much for our captors, who ordered us to stop.
The sun was setting, the plane darkening. “Tonight is Shabbat,” I wrote in my diary, using the Hebrew word for the Sabbath, and feeling bad for the “many kosher people who cannot eat the little food given out.” Some of the observant Jews asked the crew for candles, but they had none to offer. A commando inquired into the cause of distressed voices and donated a few. Dinner brought leftovers from lunchtime, until suddenly the commandos supplied tomatoes and cooked green beans, then gave out candy to the children.
All of this happened right before they took the rest of the men away.
Some felt sure the commandos would never blow up a plane full of women and children. Others worried that our guards would quickly exit and do just that. The approaching night felt menacing, even to a child adept at suppressing fear. In the dark, Catherine and I sat by one of the open exit doors with our friend from Brooklyn. She was smart, and she would know what to do if anything happened.
The stewardesses, ever fulfilling their roles, helped everyone settle in for a sixth night, some of us finally able to stretch across three seats. Even so, our guardian from Brooklyn took the middle seat in our row so that Catherine and I could each lean on one shoulder.
The next morning, the commandos told all of us to get ready to depart for good. Around me, my fellow-hostages were oddly quiet, as if displays of exuberance might prompt our captors to change their minds. Or maybe it was the memory of Monday night’s sudden return to the aircraft that left us unsure of what would happen next.
Down on the desert floor, our guards directed Catherine and me to the first van in a convoy. Our driver wore a khaki uniform and a maroon beret, which Catherine understood signified the Jordanian Army. The front passenger seat was reserved for a Popular Front commando, armed with a machine gun. Looking out the window of the van, the planes appeared to Catherine as three silver dragonflies perched on the horizon.
I was trying to feel hopeful, but I could tell that Catherine was scared, and I saw that one of the women in our van was crying. No one told us where we were going, or why. Our driver started the engine, the tires kicking up dusty sand. Riding out of the desert, following a truck filled with armed commandos, we heard a series of booms. It should have been obvious what caused the sound, but I wasn’t sure, nor did I turn around or let myself imagine the three airplanes behind me exploding into flames. Copying our fellow-passengers, Catherine and I crouched down.
The convoy kept moving, our van in the lead, over a ridge and through a mile or two of sand and gravel. On the outskirts of Amman, refugee camps came into view. I saw tents and clotheslines and whole families, including children, behind fences. When our driver reached a paved road, he slowed down as people gathered around the vehicle. Some stared. Others clapped and cheered. A few smacked the sides. I peered into the face of a smiling boy—a face I would ever after recall—unsure if he and his friends were celebrating our captivity or our release.
Some two hours later, our van was the first to arrive at our destination, following directly behind the army truck carrying Popular Front commandos, four of them standing tall, their long weapons held straight at their sides. Through a megaphone, a woman sang in Arabic. I didn’t know what message she was conveying.
As soon as Catherine saw the Jordan Intercontinental Hotel, with flags of different nations fluttering out front, she felt a measure of relief. I thought the building was beautiful, its boxy seven stories made of white cement and glass, balconies forming a grid of squares across the façade. Between the van and the hotel arose a forest of camera lenses, tripods, and microphones, a herd of reporters pressing against us on all sides.
“This morning we were piled into buses,” I wrote in my diary. “We were going to Amman, to a hotel. Then maybe to New York tomorrow! Thank God! Thank God!” If our ordeal was really over, I decided, it would be my mandate to craft everything that had happened into an adventure story. Since the ending was going to be happy, I could even mix in a few scary moments.
The Intercontinental was at the center of a city caught in an unofficial war between Jordanian forces and Palestinian insurgents, but I didn’t register any of that. Perhaps it was hard to detect the signs of the battle-ravaged interior because there was so much pandemonium. Some commandos threatened to smash the cameras of newsmen who were rudely closing in on released hostages, while others helpfully held babies. Some young children slept sprawled atop suitcases, while others ran around unrestrained. Or maybe I consciously ignored the evidence of warfare because I knew it was something I wouldn’t want to remember.
While I stayed quiet, Catherine spoke into a reporter’s microphone. “At first we didn’t know what they wanted of us, and that scared us,” she said. “What are you going to do now?” another reporter asked. “Now I am going to thank God and have a bath,” she said. Her answer would become the New York Times’ Quotation of the Day, which my father would clip and save forever.
Maybe the hijacking felt like it happened to someone else because it did. Maybe that twelve-year-old girl, the one who was unable to absorb so much, and who worked so hard to forget, was a different person from the grownup searching to understand what happened and why she remembered so little. Maybe that was why a meticulous reconstruction of my experiences of the hijacking could connect me only faintly to the fear with which Catherine contended, both her own and mine: a yoke of responsibility that made my sister’s terror so much more acute.
No reconstruction could connect me to my own feelings of fear back then because I had so fully obliterated those feelings, and then so completely disconnected that girl in the desert from the rest of my life.
On a summer day nearly fifty years later, I watched unedited news footage in the Motion Picture Research Room of the National Archives. The scenes appear in haphazard order, mixing our desert departure with what came afterward, and later a graduate student in Middle Eastern studies would translate for me the words of the commandos in the army vehicle riding ahead of our van, singing through a megaphone: “We have brought the planes down. They are ours. May the Palestine revolution live forever.”
Watching the tapes, I saw some of what I remembered. The hotel stands against the hilly terrain beyond the city’s downtown, palm trees reaching to the top of the ground floor. The letter “J” in the sign for Hotel Jordan Intercontinental sports a nineteen-sixties-style flourish. Soldiers direct our vehicle. A commando holds a megaphone. Horns honk. People speak in Arabic. Men in khaki uniforms wear red hats. Some men wear kaffiyehs. Cameramen run beside our vehicle. Thirteen minutes in, the tape switches to the inside of a van, passengers displaying inexpressive caution—a photographer has thrust his camera straight into one of the open windows.
And there we are. I sit impassively, hand to cheek. Shielding me, partly obscuring me, Catherine looks straight into the lens, serious, responsible, afraid. She twists around to look out the windows, scanning the commotion, planning what to do, thinking, How can I keep us from being separated? How can I keep Martha safe? Tentatively, then, I look around, too. Large cameras and microphones completely surround us, shooting pictures, rapid-fire. (“Reporters, TV cameras, other cameras, microphones, everything!,” I would soon write in my diary.) Another reporter’s hands, holding a camera, come in through the window, snapping one photo after another. (“This one guy took around 25 pictures of me in a row.”)
Right there, on the screen before my eyes, was the twelve-year-old girl I’d been trying to conjure. But there was that feeling again: despite all the documents, despite all the people I’d talked to, the hijacking must have happened to someone else. Studying the moving image of that girl made me feel more than anything else like a historian coming upon a visual representation of her long-researched subject for the first time. Watching the tape all these years later, I wrote down, “I can’t believe I was there.” ♦
This is drawn from “My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering.”
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