Palestinians have long struggled to have their voices heard in the West. Long the subjects of an inequitable international system that perpetuated racial discrimination to their detriment, Palestinians gradually concluded that in order to decolonize themselves, they also needed to invalidate imperial culture. The birth of neighbouring Arab nation-states, ensuing European transfers of power, and public declarations of national independence would not naturally engender Palestinian self-determination. The globalization of Palestinian perspectives, many leaders tragically determined after the nakbah, would serve as a key anti-colonial tactic vis-à-vis Zionism and advance the ongoing process of decolonization by further humanizing Palestinians, while simultaneously decolonizing Western ways of seeing and representing the Arab world. The United States, given its global status as a political, economic, and cultural superpower, as well as its nascent “special relationship” with Israel, thus became a central site whereby Palestinians actively enacted a global anti-Orientalist project and invoked what Edward Said later referred to as the Palestinian “permission to narrate.” This paper explores the activities of the New York-based Palestine Arab Refugee Office (PARO), the first unofficial Palestinian-led organization that defended the Palestinian human right to self-determination in the United States following the establishment of Israel. Based mainly on the private papers of PARO public relations officer Sami Hadawi, the memoirs and writings of PARO President Dr. Izzat Tannous, as well as numerous APRO publications (such as its monthly newsletter), it examines how this small, two-person operation attempted to culturally decolonize Americans, and thus Palestinians in the process, from its creation in 1955 to the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization. More specifically, it unearths the ways in which the PARO opened the way for its successor, the PLO, to become the first non-governmental observer to speak at a plenary session of the United Nations General Assembly. The APRO, this paper argues, was crucial in the formation of an Arab-led, transnational anti-Orientalist project that united peoples in both the Arab world and the United States in order to: 1) to overturn anti-Arab prejudices; 2) improve U.S. diplomatic relations with Arab peoples and states; and 3) promote Arab human rights in the world.