Imad Nuwayhid (1944-1975) was a student, writer, fighter, and “martyr.” Well before his death during the earliest phase of the Lebanese Civil War, Imad was working in the hospitality industry, traveling around Europe, and engaging with European and Arab thinkers alike. He left Lebanon for Switzerland and England in the late 1960s as a Marxist-Leninist intellectual, frequenting smaller, middle-class, student organizations in Beirut like the Union of Lebanese Communists. He returned in the early 1970s, searching for a new home in the Arab Left, eventually joining the mainstream Lebanese Communist Party in 1973. Thereafter, he trained with the PLO and joined the ranks of the fighters in the Lebanese National Movement. Imad’s shift, simply put, from intellectual to fighter, was not unique. It reflected other, leftist, young men and women who were at a crossroads in the early 1970s: between theoretical and realized revolution. Some of them held out in their smaller cadres, but many ended up joining more established political parties of the Lebanese National Movement, like the Lebanese Communist Party and Progressive Socialist Party. Imad’s actions, then, provide an opportunity to examine the history of the Lebanese Left in the years preceding the war. With Imad’s letters from London in the early 1970s, the print culture of multiple leftist organizations he frequented, and interviews with his friends and comrades, this paper finds that a transition towards Arab internationalism in the 1970s, grounded in Palestinian armed liberation, coupled with the local incursions between the Lebanese state, workers, and the PLO, were central in youth like Imad turning away from the more intellectually driven, middle class movements and towards the larger, working class, more established fighting forces. In London, Imad criticized British treatment of foreigners and actively connected the plight of Palestinians and Arabs to those of other oppressed people, whether in the Global South or North. In Lebanon, Imad’s witnessing of the Ghandour Factory Strike of 1972, and the May ’73 crisis, both of which pitted leftist works and the Palestinian cause against the state, convinced Imad to move towards the front lines. This paper seeks to contribute to the literature on the global ‘60s, the Arab Left, and youth politics in this era. It joins those scholars that attempt to write the Middle East into the global ‘60s, following the people and ideas that constructed international, radical networks, grounded in global and local revolution.