| Khaled Yashruti | |
| Office: | Member of the National Command of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party |
| Term Start: | 1 September 1959 |
| Term End: | 23 October 1963 |
| Birth Date: | 1937 |
| Birth Place: | Akko, British Palestine |
| Death Date: | 1970 |
| Death Place: | Beirut, Lebanon |
| Party: | Lebanon/Palestine Regional Branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party |
Khaled Yashruti (1937 in Akko, Mandatory Palestine – 1970 in Beirut, Lebanon) was a Palestinian political activist and a leading member of the PLO.[1]
Beyond the Bagdad-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" 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.
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 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 not an accident, but murder.