Khaled Yashruti
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Khaled Yashruti (born 1937 in Akko, Palestine - died 1970 in Beirut, Lebanon) was a Palestinian political activist and a leading member of the PLO.
Contents |
[edit] The Right wing of Fatah
Beyond the center-right Bagdad-controlled Palestinian Baath Party known as the Arab Liberation Front (ALF), there were some high-ranking members of Fatah itself who were heavily influenced by the original/non-Marxist Pan-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.
[edit] 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 the Middle-East as a counterweight to the growing influence of the USSR and Israel.
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.
