She was taken hostage by Palestinians 55 years ago. Now she’s an anti-Zionist activist.
Catherine “Ryn” Hodes never saw the world the same way after she was taken hostage by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) on her way back to the U.S. from Israel when she was thirteen. The experience sparked her lifelong journey towards becoming a passionate advocate for Palestinian liberation.
It was September 6, 1970. Hodes was traveling as an unaccompanied minor with her 12-year-old sister, Martha, on a flight to New York when armed commandos took control of their plane. Passengers—now hostages—screamed, prayed, and wept. Martha and Ryn froze.
“There was commotion and confusion,” Hodes recalls. “I remember airplane personnel began to emerge from the cockpit with their hands up and my seatmate said, ‘It’s the Arabs, it’s the Arabs, oh my God, oh my God!’”
“There was an announcement on the loudspeaker—a woman’s voice speaking English— saying, ‘We are the new captains of your TWA Flight. We’ve taken command of this flight. We’re going to bring you to a friendly country with friendly people. We ask you to place your hands on your heads so as not to endanger yourselves or any other passengers. We hope you understand.’”
Over 300 hostages from three hijacked flights spent six harrowing days in the Jordanian desert inside their airplanes before being released. They had limited but adequate food and water, no air conditioning, and only had access to the toilets inside the plane without running water.
Hodes was afraid, but found herself feeling curious and empathetic about the hijackers’ lives. In an interview with the Boston Phoenix a month after the hijacking, she said she was not sure if what she heard was propaganda but she believed a lot of what they said was true.
“They gave out brown envelopes and in them were typed papers explaining the whole story of how for 22 years they’ve been kicked out of their homes and they’re refugees,” she said. “Before the hijacking ever happened, I’d heard one side of the story. And when the hijacking happened, I began to hear the other side of the story. I’m not saying I know who’s right or wrong, but it gave me a lot to think about.”
“My feelings towards the Palestinians is sympathy.”
While she tears up as she recalls it today at age 68, she still has compassion for those who did it.
“They made a decision that this was the only way they would be heard,” Hodes says.
The hijackers cut some rope for the children to jump rope and brought them a case of orange Fanta. A woman, one of the commando leaders, played with the children. Ryn and Martha told them the medicine they took for asthma and one hour later they brought them that exact medication. At the time, Ryn told the press, “They could have done anything to us. They did everything they could for us and that earned my respect.”
The hijackers told the hostages that their own families were living in tents and didn’t have enough food—and they were going without food to give what they had to the hostages.
She learned years later that the true danger came from elsewhere.
“Nixon and Kissinger were talking about aggressively intervening, which would have gotten us all killed,” she says. “I was not in danger at that time from the commandos. Of course, I thought I might be. I’d seen dynamite wired through the plane. They were heavily armed. So of course, there’d be no reason why I wouldn’t be terrified, but the real risk was from Nixon and Kissinger. I think it was the Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird who said it wasn’t a good idea. But if they’d gotten their way, I wouldn’t be here.”
When Hodes returned home to New York, her parents encouraged her not to talk about the experience, to put it out of her mind—and she did. For years she didn’t talk about the incident, but thoughts about the Palestinian cause kept brewing.
When she expressed sympathy with the plight of the Palestinians, people told her she was brainwashed, that it was Stockholm Syndrome, it was propaganda. But as she read more anti-Zionist scholars’ books and talked with anti-Zionist people, she realized while the hijackers’ actions were extreme, their views were not. Millions around the world also believed in a free Palestine and she decided she agreed.
She had never heard of Palestine before 1970.
“Zionism was just part of the air you breathed,” Hodes recalls. “I heard that the Jews went to this uninhabited desert and built this country that is now the homeland for Jews. I never heard about Palestinians and villages that had names and agriculture and tribes. I never heard that Palestinians and Jews and Muslims and Druze people lived in this area with a kind of shared indigeneity.”
“When I think back to that way of thinking, it creates a lot of sadness as well as indignation and anger. It’s really sad, because that’s not what it was. To learn that this fantasy of a place had not been empty, and that there were people there that had nothing to do with the persecution we’d experienced as European Jews, and to learn that their villages were being razed and annihilated, and they had nowhere to go… A lot of these things, the first time I learned it was from the Palestinians that hijacked us.”
Hodes grew up in Jewish culture in New York City, though she wasn’t religious. She didn’t have a Bat Mitzvah or attend temple, Sabbath, or seders regularly, but identifying strongly as a Jew and being in Jewish community was important.
When she was eight or nine her parents divorced and her mother remarried an Israeli and moved to Tel Aviv. Ryn and Martha stayed in New York with their father and began to spend every summer in Israel with their mother and step-father, flying back and forth unaccompanied. She experienced Israel as a place with beaches, art, movie theaters, and folk dances in the square.
While she was aware of bomb shelters and checkpoints, they didn’t worry her or cause her to question why they were there. She was generally aware of the Six-Day War in 1967 and saw the destroyed tanks and trucks on the side of the road. She understood “Arabs,” broadly, to be an enemy.
Once she learned about Palestine from her hostage experience, she questioned Zionism more and more over time. It didn’t make sense to her that the response to the Holocaust would be to exile Palestinians from their land who had nothing to do with it or that Jews needed one sliver of land in the world to be safe when they should be safe everywhere in the world. What was once a given no longer held water.
As an adult she began to identify as an anti-Zionist for Palestinian liberation, a cause she is passionate about today. Hodes creates mixed-media art and sells it to benefit UNWRA and Middle East Children’s Alliance for aid in Gaza.
While she still gets resistance from Zionists that her beliefs are the result of brainwashing, Hodes analyzes the experience from a wider lens.
She has compassion for Hamas’s hostages—as well as their families thinking of what her parents went through 55 years ago—but her primary concern is Israel’s hostages.
“I think of Gaza as a hostage situation,” she says. “I think of the thousands of Palestinians being held hostage by Israel’s policies since the Nakba.”
“When you compare what happened to me to what Israel does in terms of their policies towards Palestinians, you tell me who’s the real aggressor, who’s the real hostage taker.”
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