During the 1970s, the Palestine Liberation Organization developed a complex of economic initiatives that were meant to form the backbone of a future Palestinian state. Working out of Beirut, the PLO’s economic arm, SAMED, built factories and workshops, exhibited their products at international fairs, and started agricultural cooperatives in Africa and the Arab world. At the height of its production in 1982, SAMED had forty-three factories in Lebanon with about five thousand employees. The rhetoric surrounding these endeavors was anchored in the language of the New Left, where the workers in SAMED’s factories were seen as revolutionary subjects and militants in their own right, contributing in their own way to the national struggle. SAMED’s declared aim was to integrate women into the Palestinian labor force as equals of men. The political education of its workers, both men and women, emphasized not only literacy, politics, technical skills, and hygiene, but also gender equality. Despite these ideals, women were integrated unevenly into the workforce SAMED had envisioned during its years in Lebanon. Their type of labor remained gendered and was often carried out from home. The facile explanation put forward by SAMED’s cadres at the time was the “traditional“ nature of society in the camps. Rather than stop at such explanations, I argue that there were aspects to the PLO’s economic project that better explain the limits of turning women into workers. The PLO’s economic project was embedded within capitalist logics of production linked to the formation of a future state. In tandem with this, women were placed at the center of the nationalist imaginary and continued to be associated with tradition and traditional modes of production. I explain the inability to incorporate women as equal revolutionary subjects in the economic realm in terms of the tension between, on the one hand, forming revolutionary female subjects, and, on the other, women’s place in the nationalist’s imaginary and capitalist conceptions of labor. As such, gender is a crucial site for understanding the larger tension between the transnational revolutionary vision and the politics of national liberation.