Leila Khaled - Later Life

Later Life

Khaled has said in interviews that she developed a fondness for the United Kingdom when her first visitor in jail, an immigration officer, wanted to know why she had arrived in the country without a valid visa. She also developed a relationship with the two policewomen assigned to guard her in Ealing and later corresponded with them. Khaled continued to return to Britain for speaking engagements until as late as 2002, although she was refused a visa by the British embassy in 2005 to address a meeting at the Féile an Phobail in Belfast, where she was invited as a speaker. Eventually she managed to speak to people at the Belfast Féile through a video link

Khaled is wary of the Arab-Israeli peace process. According to her, "It's not a peace process. It's a political process where the balance of forces is for the Israelis and not for us. They have all the cards to play with and the Palestinians have nothing to depend on, especially when the PLO is not united." She has become involved in politics, becoming a member of the Palestinian National Council and appearing regularly at the World Social Forum.

Witnesses say that in the late 1970s she studied history at Rostov University (USSR) but never graduated. She simply vanished in the early 1980s. There were rumours that she left for Lebanon to fight against the Israeli army invading Lebanon at that time.

She is married to the physician Fayez Rashid Hilal, and today lives with their two sons Bader and Bashar in Amman, Jordan.

She was the subject of a film entitled Leila Khaled, Hijacker. The documentary film "Hijacker – The Life of Leila Khaled", directed by Palestinian filmmaker, Lina Makboul, premiered in November, 2005 at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam.

In 2011, Khaled went on a speaking tour in Sweden, including speeches at May Day demonstrations of the Communist Party and the Central Organisation of the Workers of Sweden, a public Art Gallery, Södertörn University College and a seminar arranged by the Left Party.

She is scheduled to appear in the UK again via video link at the Socialist Workers Party's annual Marxism Festival in July 2012.