This films clocks in at just under an hour, so on the border between a short film and a feature-length film. 20%-25% of it is in English, but the entire film has English subtitles, including the parts in English.
Leila Khaled is a Palestinian who hijacked two planes about forty years ago. There were no casualties.
This interview-based documentary was made by a Palestinian from Sweden (Lina Makboul) who admits that as a young girl, Leila Khaled was one of her heroes. The film is unapologetically sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and ambivalent about Khaled. Since anything acceptable to the American mainstream would be ambivalent about, or more likely condemnatory of, the Palestinian cause in general, and unambiguously condemnatory of Khaled as a terrorist, this film will likely seem like blatant propaganda to those used to American fare.
I found it mildly biased, but not highly objectionable in that regard. I’m a little more forgiving about this degree of bias for something where the far more common bias is in the other direction, as it makes for something closer to balance collectively.
Aside from bias, I have mixed feelings about the film itself. The filmmaker provides useful historical background on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict dating back to the 1940s (again, from a perspective sympathetic to the Palestinian side, but not, in my opinion, terribly deceptive), interviews Khaled at length, and secures interviews with various other figures–not all on her side–such as the pilots and others who were aboard the hijacked planes.
Makboul asks some worthwhile questions (which sometimes get thoughtful responses from the interviewees, and sometimes political boilerplate), and an occasional dumb question. On multiple occasions I either didn’t know what she was asking Khaled, or it seemed like she was asking about something trivial. On one or more of those occasions, Khaled looked like she had the same reaction to the question I did.
One thing I got a kick out of in the interviews was Khaled’s noting how appalling were the questions of her by the press back at the time of the hijackings. She was an attractive woman in her 20s then, so the questions tended to be about whether she had a boyfriend, her beauty techniques, her sex life, and so on. Even as a hijacker a woman couldn’t get taken seriously.
Something that was interesting to me, but that I suspect some viewers would be bothered by, is the way the present day Khaled is presented as such a “normal” person. She is shown doting over her family in matronly fashion, cooking, urging the filmmaker to find herself a husband and settle down, reminiscing with comrades of the past in a casual, caring way, joking around with the filmmaker and crew in “outtake”-type material, etc. If you didn’t know what she had done, if you had no position on the Israeli-Palestinian issues, she’s mostly a likable, late middle-aged woman.
The interview editing appears manipulative in places. Makboul makes something of a big deal about a challenging question she’s wanting to ask Khaled (in fact it’s not an unfair question, nor anything more accusatory than some of what she’s already asked her), but chickens out. The film ends with her asking the question later by phone instead. The credits roll without a response. The implication seems to be that Khaled got angry or refused to answer or hung up or something in response to the “tough” question. But really that’s just implied by the way it was edited to create a dramatic ending. It’s impossible to know what Khaled’s actual response was.
There’s also a point where an Israeli pilot is challenged about Israeli terrorist actions in the 1940s. He reluctantly acknowledges one such incident, downplaying the scale of it, and says “So?” At which point the clip abruptly ends. He is in the middle of making a comparative point about Israel’s wrongful actions being a drop in the bucket compared to those of the Arabs, but by cutting it off at that word, the editing makes him sound heartless, like he sees the killing of Palestinians as having no relevance to the issue at hand.
Both sides of course make use of the “But they did it first, they do it more, and they do worse versions of it” defense of their actions. I never buy that argument completely, but I don’t think it always lacks merit to the same degree.
Coming from Khaled, I don’t find the argument persuasive to the point that I would endorse her actions or follow in her footsteps, but I find myself equally or slightly more sympathetic to it compared to the average such defense of some political action or other I’ve encountered in my life. The filmmaker expresses surprise that Khaled doesn’t show remorse but instead still tries to justify her actions, but in doing so Khaled doesn’t come across to me as a fanatic blind to the horrible things she does and advocates (at least no more so than regular, mainstream politicians and military leaders that almost everyone accepts as reasonable, respectable, non-terrorists even when they disagree with them.)
For Khaled, the hijackings were basically publicity stunts. Or maybe not “stunts,” since that makes them sound frivolous, but actions motivated by seeking publicity for their cause. As she says, (paraphrasing), “Love us or hate us, agree with us or disagree with us, when we hijacked those planes, everyone had to sit up and take notice of what we wanted to tell them about the Palestinians’ plight. Whereas when Palestinians were being tortured in Israeli prisons, the outside world didn’t know or care.” So in her mind, Palestinians are being victimized in horrific indefensible ways, but victimhood alone doesn’t get one noticed, so they had to become perpetrators rather than victims to get people’s attention, and she at least chose means of maximum flash for minimum destruction.
And I can’t disagree that what she did is pretty mild, as terrorism goes. They hijacked planes, didn’t kill anyone, let the people go unharmed once they’d gotten a chance to state their case to the press, apologized to them repeatedly for frightening and inconveniencing them to the extent they had, and then blew up the empty planes.
Not exactly a nice way to spend one’s time, but I’ll take her over the people who fly planes into buildings and kill thousands of civilians any day of the week. And for that matter, as I alluded to earlier, I think the uses of political violence and garden variety war by Americans and Israelis and others of the “good guys” is often as bad or worse than what she did, even though it fits in the mainstream of what most people regard as respectable, non-terrorist, actions.
In response to Khaled’s attempted justifications, Makboul is inclined to agree with her that it’s hypocritical for folks like the American and Israeli elite to condemn her as a “terrorist” when they have done the same or a lot worse than what she did. But she is ambivalent about Khaled for two reasons (with which I agree). One, just because she can point to equal or greater injustices on the other side, that doesn’t change the fact that certain tactics involving civilians can still be morally wrong. Two, aside from the intrinsic moral status of a tactic like hijacking, it can also be criticized on grounds of effectiveness. The publicity that acts like hers generated have kept the Palestinians from suffering in secret, but is all publicity good publicity? The actions of Khaled and her ilk–yes, combined with spin and hypocrisy and such from other parties–has resulted in a world where in a word association exercise, most people’s first response to “Palestinian” would be “terrorist,” “hijacker,” “fanatic,” or the like. Is that better or worse than being ignored?
The film doesn’t really address the possibility of an alternative, something other than conventional warfare (obviously the Israelis would blow them away), the “soft” terrorism represented by someone like Khaled, more blatant terrorism, or abject surrender to the occupation. Maybe it’s too idealistic, but I of course always hope people will explore creative nonviolence as a means of resistance. Khaled and her cohorts looked to figures like Che for their inspiration. How might history have been different if they had emulated Gandhi instead?
