During the British Mandate, Palestine became a regional hub of oil infrastructures, with the construction of the Kirkuk-Haifa-Tripoli pipelines, the Haifa Refinery, and an extensive network of asphalt roads. This talk will explore how Palestine was linked to global and regional circuits of oil and capital while becoming internally divided. Within three decades, oil transformed from a rarely used fuel into Palestine’s primary energy source, reshaping key areas of society and the economy, including mobility, agriculture, industry, and domestic life. The talk will demonstrate how the growing use of oil created new forms of spatial segregation between Arabs and Jews, marked by unequal access to paved roads and motorized transport, which resulted in a division of space into separate Jewish and Arab enclaves.

Shira Pinhas is a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University’s Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. A historian of the social and material history of Palestine/Israel and the broader Levant region, her research focuses on understanding how new infrastructures and technologies, along with transnational flows of energy, materials, capital, and labor, shaped political hierarchies and social subjectivities during the twentieth century.