THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

If the 1969 hijacking made Leila Khaled famous for a few weeks, the audacity and scale of her 1970 enterprise extended her notoriety to new heights. The deliberate explosion of the four hijacked planes which had reached Dawson’s Field in Jordan, the confrontation between the Palestinian resistance and the Jordanian army, which almost tipped the country into civil war, and the involvement of Syria, Israel, the USSR, and the USA, brought the world to a state of extreme tension. 

Irving/Khaled

For Khaled, the events of 1970 meant that her image joined that of Che Guevara on thousands of left-wing walls, and to many she became the archetype of the female revolutionary and the Palestinian woman. This notoriety was to have significant consequences for her, and for the way she and her cause have been regarded.

Irving/Khaled