Using a series of oral history interviews I conducted with a longtime, influential, southern Lebanese communist partisan, Husayn Ba’lbaki (Abu Jubran), this paper presents a biographical, microhistorical reading of the trajectory of the Lebanese National Movement (LNM) and its alliance with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) between the 1960s and 80s. Born circa 1931, Ba’lbaki hails from ʿAytarun, a southern village bordering Palestine. A militant in the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) since 1950, in the 1960s he became involved in a series of heterodox communist factions and eventually settled in the Organization of Communist Action in Lebanon. From there, he held an important position of responsibility in the LNM in south Lebanon during the war era. It situates these interviews alongside diplomatic sources and recently published memoirs of other participants in the LNM-PLO alliance, including accounts by two of his closest Palestinian comrades in the late 1970s, Muʿin al-Tahir and Shafiq al-Ghabra, both influential fighters and leaders in Fatah’s Student Brigades (al-Katiba al-Tullabiyya, later the Jarmaq Brigade). Much analysis routinely underlines the PLO-LNM’s political organization and armed resistance as ineffectual, if not “callous, arrogant, and shortsighted.” Yet buried under the condescension of the larger defeats is an underappreciated history of significant achievements and continuous struggle against overwhelming power. These histories can be retrieved through oral histories and memoirs of committed participants and villagers who were the subjects and objects of rule and various political projects, carefully contextualized and juxtaposed alongside policy records, print media, and memoirs. The steadily advancing age of this generation makes the necessity of such investigations even more pressing. In doing so, it pushes against the recent wave of Anglophone research on the twentieth-century Arab left that has thus far focused considerably on the history of professional intellectuals at the expense of other constituencies.