“In the Shadow of Dual Authority” contributes to an emerging literature that seeks to engage with Arab thought production in relation to the United States, as it was grounded in the revolutionary worldviews and practices of the late 1960s and early 1970s. To that end, it explores Palestinian revolutionary analyses of the political and economic role of the United States (US) in the Arab world between the years 1968 and 1971. This period spanned roughly from the Battle of Karamah, when Palestinian guerrilla groups resisted extended Israeli aerial and ground attacks in the Jordan Valley alongside the Jordanian Army, to the fallout from Black September, the limited war that unfolded in 1970 between the two competing authorities in the country: the Jordanian monarchy and the guerrilla bases of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Over the course of those two years, the United States changed dramatically as a military and economic power, both in the Arab world and beyond. Out of this turn, the US developed a number of new security arrangements in the region, including in Jordan, where it backed both Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan in an effort to defeat an ongoing regional revolutionary tide led by the Palestinian national movement. In the eye of that revolutionary storm, the PLO had turned Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan into bases of revolution. In this setting, Palestinian revolutionaries’ understanding of the US developed through a combination of practice and theory production, a process shaped by intellectual exchange between internationalist anti-imperialist movements and by first-hand experiences on the receiving end of US-supported counterinsurgency. Whereas previous scholarship on this period had tended to label the situation a "civil war" and to emphasize the decision-making processes of the US, Israel, and Jordan (Nevo, 2008, Chamberlin, 2012, and Yaqub, 2016), this paper elucidates interpretations of these events as a revolutionary process of "dual power" found within Palestinian organizations Fateh, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP). The paper lends particular attention to converges and divergences in these factions' readings of US power and its significance for their respective revolutionary strategies. In doing so, it draws on rare Arabic pamphlets and official publications of the major PLO parties, as well as the memoirs of individual participants.