Bookshelves Summer 2026

"He's got a gun. She's got a grenade."

It was 1970, and a young Mimi Beeber Nichter, B.A. ’71, was on TWA flight 741 from Tel Aviv to New York.

She’d barely made the flight. She was wearing a green minidress—something she came to regret. She had been working at a kibbutz over the summer picking pears and was eager to get back to the U.S. and start her senior year at GW.

The pilot had just announced they were flying over Brussels with eight hours left to go to New York when a woman sprinted down the aisle with a man close on her heels. Maybe she was ill, or they were fighting?

Within seconds, it became clear that neither was the case. “Get back, get back! This is a hijack,” the man yelled.

Not long after, a female voice with a thick accent told them from the cockpit that their captors were members of the militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). “This is your new captain speaking,” she said. “You are being taken to a friendly country.” There were 145 people on board.

“I was so naive. I didn't really understand. It happened so fast,” said Nichter, whose book, “Hostage: A Memoir of Terrorism, Trauma, and Resilience” (Potomac Books, 2026), recounts her experience for the first time.

The plane landed in a remote desert in Jordan. Outside were uniformed guerrillas with guns. Across the aisle, an Orthodox couple were frantically ripping up their Israeli passports, swallowing the ID pages and stuffing the rest between their seats.

“Those two things—that’s when I realized this is really something incredibly serious," she said.

The hostages were forced to stay on the plane. Two other planes had been hijacked as well.

Over the next few days, most women and children were sent home, but not Nichter, who was accused of being an Israeli soldier. She wasn’t, but her captors had found an army shirt in her backpack, given to her by a friend, and a photo of her wearing it. It was enough.

She was led up to the cockpit where a man put a gun to her temple and said, “Tell the truth now, or this will be the end of you.” He let her return to her seat but warned they were watching her.

Nichter ended up spending six days and nights on the plane.

During those sweltering days, there was little food or water, and no air conditioning, flushing toilets or running water on board.

As soon as they disembarked, all three planes were blown up. Seats, doors, wings, windows hurtled through the air; thick black smoke covered the desert sky.

Nichter and 31 others were taken to an apartment in Amman. What followed was more than two weeks of uncertainty and terror. Fighting between the Jordanian army and the Palestinian guerrillas escalated when Jordan’s King Hussein ordered his military to attack all suspected guerrilla locations. Nichter and her fellow captives heard ever closer gunshots, shelling, artillery. A house near them was blown up.

During her captivity, two Palestinian women—members of the PFLP—came to talk to their small group of women hostages. These young women described how their family had been forced out of their home in Palestine in 1948, taking only what they could on their backs; how thousands of Palestinians were killed and more than half a million became refugees; how many still lived in inadequate refugee camps. This historical account challenged assumptions Nichter had grown up with.

I had been brought up in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn and a religious Jewish home,” Nichter commented. “I had never heard the story from this other side. And it made me realize that history could be different, depending on who was telling the story.”

“I began to think about the plight of the Palestinians in a way that I never had before,” she said.

After 21 days, the hostages were released. “You’re free,” said a captor. “Gather your things.” After hours in the war-torn streets, Red Cross vans picked them up. They spent a night in a hospital, then were flown to Cyprus, then Rome, then New York.

“When I got back, my parents encouraged me to just move on,” she said. It’s how she was raised in her conservative Jewish family—not to talk about trauma or feelings at all. Her brother’s debilitating mental illness was taboo as well.

“But that was how trauma was treated back then,” Nichter said. “Years would pass before PTSD entered public understanding. Soldiers who came home from the war in Vietnam were expected to just resume ‘normal’ life. “There was no recognition of the long-lasting impact of trauma.”

When she returned to GW, some classmates, who like her were anti-Vietnam War activists, naively thought her experience was “far out” because she got to spend time with “real revolutionaries.” She felt isolated and came to believe no one could understand what she had lived through.

Life, somehow, moved on. On campus, she ran into a familiar face— Mark Nichter, who she had dated before leaving for Israel. He helped her adjust back to campus and some years later, they married. Nichter went on to build an academic career in cultural anthropology and is now a professor emerita at the University of Arizona. Together, they raised two sons.

The experience of writing the book after not talking about it for so many decades was a difficult one. “Many times people write a memoir, and they've already processed what they’re writing about,” she said. “I was writing it and processing it at the same time. A lot of the fear inside me that I had never examined was now laid bare on the page; that was frightening.”

What does she hope readers will take away from the book? 

“I hope people begin to understand what it means to be a hostage. The actual experience and the lasting trauma are things that few people understand,” she said.

For Nichter, another lesson—and one she hopes for readers as well— is the importance of empathy and understanding that history looks different depending on who is telling it. As she writes in the book, “After my return, the wounds from the hijacking were raw and open, but they had also prepared me for a complex and nuanced understanding of the world and perhaps my place in it.”