- Khaled Yashruti
Khaled Yashruti (born 1937 in Akko, Palestine - died 1970 in
Beirut ,Lebanon ) was aPalestinian political activist and a leading member of thePLO .The Right wing of Fatah
Beyond the center-right Bagdad-controlled Palestinian
Baath Party known as theArab Liberation Front (ALF), there were some high-ranking members ofFatah itself who were heavily influenced by the original/non-MarxistPan-Arab doctrine of the Baath (later known as “pro-Iraqi” Baathism).These people rejected the Soviet Union and Arab states close to it (The pro-Syrian Baath, Algeria, Libya and South Yemen). They resented Yasser Arafat’s rapprochement with Moscow and the PLO’s progressive drift towards “third-worldist” leftwing rhetoric.
They were viewed as the “conservative” rightwing of Fatah. Many were members of the Galilean/Northern Palestinian aristocracy (such as Khaled Yashruti’s father, who was the hereditary Shaykh of the
Shadhiliyya Sufi brotherhood in pre-1947 Palestine). Most had studied in the US or at the American University of Beirut in the late 1950s.Involvement in the PLO
Khaled Yashruti progressively became their leader in the mid-1960s, and became a member of the PLO leadership in 1968, two years before Fatah's commanders were expelled to Lebanon from Jordan. Yashruti’s faction had the backing of the Al-Bakr/
Saddam Hussein Baathist government in Baghdad and was generally favorable to US involvement in theMiddle-East as a counterweight to the growing influence of theUSSR andIsrael .In parallel to his political activities, Khaled worked as a civil engineer and real estate entrepreneur in Lebanon. He died in 1970 in an accident- a huge crane fell on him while he was inspecting construction works in downtown Beirut.
Some Palestinian and Lebanese journalists argued this was a murder.
Khaled Yashruti had many enemies: the KGB, the Mossad, and the radical Palestinian factions … many parties might have wanted to liquidate the only US-friendly member of the
Fatah leadership.External links
* [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907221,00.html?iid=chix-sphere "“Another Battle of Beirut ”" (Time Magazine, May 14, 1973)]
* [http://archnet.org/library/sites/one-site.tcl?site_id=6942 "“The Shadhiliyya Zawiyat ”"]
* [http://www.cryptome.org/cia-pulp/cia-esau-49.pdf "“The Palestinian Fedayeen”" (Declassified CIA Report, 1971)]
References
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
