“I come from the city of Haifa, but I remember little of my birthplace. I can see the area where I played as a small child, but of our house, I only remember the staircase. I was taken away when I was four, not to see Haifa again for many years. Finally I saw my city twenty-one years later, on August 29, 1969, when Comrade Salim Issawi and I expropriated an imperialist plane and returned to Palestine to pay homage to our occupied country and to show that we had not abandoned our homeland. Ironically, the Israeli enemy, powerless, escorted us with his French and American planes.” —Leila Khaled

First published in the UK in 1973, Leila Khaled’s My People Shall Live: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary is now freely available in digital form.