Among the original members of the Arab Nationalist Movement that emerged in Beirut after the nakba, Ahmad abu Maher al Yamani was the only Palestinian to come from a peasant background. Born to a poor family in the Galilee in 1924, he grew up through the events of the Peasant revolts of 1936-7 and organized workers against the partition of Palestine as a union leader for the Palestinian Arab Workers Society. Yamani drew on his expertise to organize refugees in Lebanon and became one of their unheralded civic leaders. He forged constituencies to negotiate with authorities from a position of strength, and his networks became the backbone of camp organization. This study of Yamani’s life uncovers civic leadership in a historiography dominated by the motif of armed struggle. Zachary Lockman’s scholarship on British Mandate Palestine traces how the growing muscularity of Zionism accelerated the social transformations that challenged existing power structures in Palestine. New civic leadership emerged from the peasant, laboring, and petit bourgeois classes to assert new identities, demand concessions, and negotiate new solidarities. Unfortunately, these transformations go largely unacknowledged in existing scholarship on Palestinians in exile. While the armed struggle motif accepts that the Nakba fractured social hierarchies and delegitimized the old elite, it fails to notice how the social transformation of the Mandate era produced the leaders, like Yamani, who would rebuild social institutions in exile. These institutions – which include teacher, student, and worker associations, scouting movements, organized rallies, commemorations, and strikes – defeated the Lebanese state’s efforts to isolate refugees. I argue that the unheralded civic leadership of the 1950s fashioned a national consciousness among peasant and poor refugees and enabled the armed struggle. My research examines Yamani’s memoirs and the correspondence of the Committee of UNRWA Teachers in Lebanon. I also draw on interviews I conducted with an older generation of Palestinian organizers, and on Al Tha’r, an underground newspaper that circulated in the early 1950s among Arab Nationalists in refugee camps.