“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.” A Personal History by Martha Hodes.
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.
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.
Writing in script with curlicue capitals, I recorded the number of our flight , the time of our departure , and where the plane would stop before landing in New York . 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.
Just in front of the curtain that led to the first-class cabin, the man and woman turned to face the passengers, shouting “Hijack!” 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”Post
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.
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. 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 . Once, when I came out of the bathroom, Palestina pointed her gun right at me and said, staring coldly, “Nowback to your seat.
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.
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 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.
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.
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