Khaled Yashruti

Khaled Yashruti (1937 in Akko, Mandatory Palestine – 1970 in Beirut, Lebanon) was a Palestinian political activist and a leading member of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The Right wing of Fatah Beyond the Baghdad-oriented Ba'ath Party-linked 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 Ba'ath.

These people rejected the Soviet Union and Arab states close to it (The pro-Syrian Ba'ath, Algeria, Libya and South Yemen). They resented Yasser Arafat's rapprochement with Moscow and the PLO's progressive drift towards "third-worldist" left-wing rhetoric.

They were viewed as the "conservative" right-wing 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 United States or at the American University of Beirut in the late 1950s.

Involvement in the PLO

He created Jabhat Tahrîr Filistîn (Palestine Liberation Front) in Liban. 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 Ba'athist government in Baghdad and was generally favorable to U.S. involvement in the Middle-East as a counterweight to the growing influence of the Soviet Union 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, where a huge crane fell on him while he was inspecting construction works in downtown Beirut. Some Palestinian and Lebanese journalists argued this was not an accident, but murder.