Martha Hodes is an American professor of history at New York University. She is the author of the award-winning books Mourning Lincoln; The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century; and White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University, the Whiting Foundation, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Diwan interviewed Hodes in late July to discuss her latest book, My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering, about her experience as a passenger in the simultaneous hijackings of three airliners in September 1970 by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The book was listed in the Editor’s Choice column of the New York Times in July.
Michael Young: At first glance, your recent book is a memoir of the fact that, as a young girl, you were among the passengers hijacked in September 1970 by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and flown to a remote airfield in Jordan. However, the book is actually much more than that, and ties in with your work as a historian. Can you describe what you were trying to do with the book, and why you chose this route?
Martha Hodes: I think of the book as a deeply researched memoir, bringing my skills as a professional historian to the quest of a memoirist. I call the book My Hijacking because it is my story only. The experience of each hostage depended on a great many variables, ranging from where you were sitting on the plane to your knowledge of, and views about, Israel-Palestine. I call the book a “personal history” because my family was caught in this world historical event when I was twelve years old, and I call it a history of “forgetting and remembering” because I set out to research not only everything I could remember, but also all that I’d erased from my memory or never knew in the first place.
My Hijacking chronicles the process of a historian investigating her own past, unfolding simultaneously as a journey through memory and history. I kept a diary as a twelve-year-old, and although I wrote in that diary every day in the desert, I found that I’d omitted key frightening incidents that I’d never succeeded in forgetting: watching our captors wire the plane with dynamite the night we landed, for example; or the time one of the commandos pointed her gun straight at me. Accordingly, I found that I’d crafted my diary entries to tell a story I could tolerate, a story that I, as a child, felt my parents could live with. After my sister and I came home, my family almost never talked about the hijacking. With the passage of nearly 50 years, then, I set out to connect myself as a grown-up historian to the twelve-year-old girl who, back in 1970, had been so determined to forget.
MY: One of the things that comes across in the book is that you do not take a harsh attitude toward the Palestinian hijackers—indeed almost the contrary is true. Can you explain why this is the case, insofar as most writers, or former passengers, might have adopted a very different approach?
MH: As a historian, I have a keen interest in multivocal perspectives, in nuance, in empathy, and in understanding global conflicts on a human scale. In the years after the 1967 war, American Jews flocked to Israel, but my sister and I were different from many of the other American Jews on our plane. We were raised in a secular household and spent summers in Israel because our mother, a dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company, had gone there for no other purpose than to help start Israel’s first modern dance troupe, the Batsheva Dance Company.
Of course, I felt a deep attachment to Israel, as the place where my mother lived when I was a child. At the same time, while on the hijacked plane, I began to learn a history I didn’t know. My sister and I were interested in the cause of our captors because in the late 1960s, at the ages of twelve and thirteen, we were coming into political consciousness. There were school assemblies about the Civil Rights movement, and we protested the Vietnam War and president Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. On the plane, we readily grasped that our captors were fully human. Most of them were kind to the children. One of the commandos jumped rope with the kids out on the desert floor, and when one of them saw my sister wiping away tears, he said, “Don’t cry. We have children too,” which felt fatherly.
MY: In one instance, you push back against a narrative that had suggested that the hijackers had separated Jews from non-Jews, a fact that passengers later remembered as eliciting images of the Holocaust. Yet you take up considerable space to correct this story. Why did you do so, especially as this may have posed risks in the polarized political climate that exists today when it comes to Israeli-Palestinian relations?
MH: For me, this was one of the most interesting parts of my research, since one of the enduring myths of these hijackings has been that the PFLP separated Jews and non-Jews. I think that myth endured because what came to pass in the desert was confusing to the hostages. At various points, our captors asked each of us whether we were Jewish. Because one of the PFLP’s goals was to exchange hostages for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, this was a way of determining each hostage’s connection to Israel, and therefore each person’s value as a hostage. But that question had a chilling, even traumatic, effect on many of the hostages and certainly made it appear as if Jews were being singled out. On our second night in the desert, the commandos released a large group of non-Jews from our plane. At the same time, though, many non-Jews were retained on our plane, and Jewish passengers were released that same night from the simultaneously hijacked Swissair plane. After the majority of hostages were released, about 50 people were held two weeks longer, and of those, about two-thirds were not Jewish.
The PFLP’s ultimate goal was a democratic, secular, pluralistic state for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. George Habash, the PFLP’s founder and leader, had recently told a reporter that his organization was not “hostile to the Jews as Jews” and did not “aim at annihilating them or throwing them into the sea.” The PFLP distinguished between Jews and Zionists, writing (at the time), “[W]e harbor no hostility to the Jews but we shall fight the Zionists because they invaded and occupied our homeland.” Some of the hostages understood this, telling reporters that the commandos “liked the Jews but they don’t like the Zionists,” that they “could live together with Jews as long as they were non-Zionist.” Still, the distinction could be fraught. William Quandt of the National Security Council noted that the PFLP “didn’t go around and ask people about their political views, they simply asked them what their religion was,” which was “not a very smart thing to do if you’re trying to combat the common view” of anti-Semitism.
MY: One person who comes across as an impressive figure in your account, almost an unrecognized hero of sorts, is your older sister Catherine. You also set her up as a foil when it comes to your own recollections of the hijacking. Can you describe the importance of your sister to you, and to your narrative and the role she played in it?
MH: As the older sibling, my sister assumed responsibility for both of us. She answered the commandos’ questions, planned how she could prevent us from being separated, and spoke to the press when we were released. She was my hero, both then and now, yet simply to call her a hero doesn’t do justice to her own experience. She was a child too, and without anyone to shield her. Because she felt she had to pay keen attention, it became harder for her to erase memories of the hijacking. When we returned home, my sister wanted to talk about the hijacking, but my father and I preferred silence. Talking with her while writing the book, I admired her candor in articulating the complexity of the interplay between personal and political. In her words (which are in the book): “It’s hard to look back on a personally terrifying event at a young age from an adult perspective of having a political context.” As she told me after the book was published: “You forgot and wanted to remember. I remembered and wanted to forget.”
MY: Beyond your memoir, you visited the Middle East many decades after the hijacking, traveling to Israel and Jordan. What impressions did this visit leave with you, both in terms of your recollections of the hijacking, and, beyond that, of a region that seems not to have emerged from the turmoil you experienced in 1970? And why did it take so long to go back?
MH: The summer after the hijacking my sister and I returned to Israel as children for the last time. Then, after my mother moved back to the United States in the late 1970s, I never felt the desire to return. Writing the book, though, I knew I had to go back. It had been nearly 50 years, and I combined that journey with a return trip to Jordan, including heading out to the desert. In Israel, I returned to the neighborhood where we had lived with our mother, in an effort to reflect on what it meant to me as a child that my divorced parents had lived an ocean apart. It was in Jordan that the most potent flashback of the hijacking came on. As a memoirist, these return trips formed part of the process of connecting myself as a historian to the twelve-year-girl I was in the past.
Politically, the PFLP was among a minority of Palestinian insurgents in 1970 who endorsed the strategy of hijacking, and the act of taking civilians hostage harmed their cause worldwide. But these hijackings also brought the commandos’ cause to light, which was one of their main goals. As children, my sister and I tried to puzzle out a question that of course remains unresolved to this day: whether everyone could find a way to live on the same land. Back in 1970, we thought—as my sister put it in an interview when we got home—that there was already too much anger and hatred to make coexistence possible.
