The 2016-2017 Native-led Standing Rock Uprising brought people together from all over the world to confront continued U.S. colonialism. One of the most notable groups to show up–for both the Sioux nation and the U.S.–were the Palestinians. Their presence triggered increased surveillance from the U.S. government and its contracted mercenary firm, TigerSwan. One leaked TigerSwan memo details how Palestinian presence meant that, at the camp, “terrorist type activities… cannot be ruled out.” While this so-called War-on-Terror language may appear a result of Palestinian presence, there is a longer story to be told. This paper roots the Standing Rock uprising, a critical moment of Native U.S.- Palestinian solidarity, in the era of Third World internationalism, particularly when the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) formed a relationship with the American Indian Movement (AIM). This paper looks at this time as a moment of crisis and opportunity: crisis for settler states, particularly the U.S. and Israel; opportunity for those fighting for liberation, like AIM and the PLO. As the U.S. entered into a crisis of accumulation, Israel began emerging as an imperialist power. The 1970s was also the decade that birthed the category of the terrorist as we know it today. This paper untangles these narrative lines by looking at moments of parallel between AIM and the PLO’s insurgency; and between the U.S. and Israel’s counterinsurgency. I ask, what can this history and these relationships tell us about how the category of the terrorist is connected to liberation struggles over land? By bringing together scholars of Native North America and Palestine, I argue that looking at this relationship can uncover not only how Indigenous insurgency provided the foundation from which the legal and social category of the terrorist would emerge, but also how the relationship between the PLO and AIM during this historical moment both shaped and contested the rise of colonial counterinsurgency that would eventually become what we know as the Global War on Terror.