It took Mimi Nichter over fifty years to process and recount her trau­mat­ic expe­ri­ence after her TWA flight from Tel Aviv to New York was high­jacked by the PFLP (Pop­u­lar Front for the Lib­er­a­tion of Pales­tine) in 1970.

In Hostage, Nichter describes in detail how she and her fel­low pas­sen­gers mirac­u­lous­ly sur­vived hor­rif­ic con­di­tions dur­ing three weeks of cap­tiv­i­ty, first on the hijacked air­plane, after land­ing in the Jor­dan­ian desert and lat­er in and near Amman, Jor­dan. Their emp­ty plane was blown up to focus world atten­tion on the Pales­tin­ian refugee plight and to gain release of Pales­tin­ian pris­on­ers in Israel and elsewhere. 

A twen­ty-year-old Amer­i­can col­lege stu­dent from Brook­lyn at the time, Nichter lost twen­ty-five pounds in three weeks from semi-star­va­tion. She suf­fered in filth and fear, not know­ing whether she would be raped or killed at any moment. Post trau­mat­ic stress dis­or­der was not clas­si­fied as a men­tal health diag­no­sis until 1980, accord­ing to Nichter, a writer and anthro­pol­o­gist, who final­ly felt able to share her sto­ry of pain, resilience and healing.

Nichter describes her relent­less fear as well as her cap­tors, includ­ing a sym­pa­thet­ic guard who risked his life to bring the hostages food and water dur­ing the Jor­dan­ian civ­il war, which raged out­side the small build­ing where they were held captive. 

These were the ear­ly days of Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ism. which mor­phed into the 1972 Munich Olympics mas­sacre of Israeli ath­letes, ​“Glob­al­ize the Intifa­da,” and the hor­rif­ic Octo­ber 7, 2023, attack by mil­i­tant Pales­tini­ans at the Nova Music Fes­ti­val and on near­by kib­butz­im in south­ern Israel.

A new hostage mem­oir of the same title by Israeli Eli Shara­bi recounts the lat­est man­i­fes­ta­tion of this relent­less and heart­break­ing threat. Nichter’s and Sharabi’s accounts book­end the long and increas­ing­ly vio­lent his­to­ry of Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ism and its victims.