Khaled Yashruti

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.

• “Another Battle of Beirut ” (Time Magazine, May 14, 1973)
• “The Shadhiliyya Zawiyat ”
• “The Palestinian Fedayeen” (Declassified CIA Report, 1971)