In recent years, a new wave of scholarship demonstrated that the British mandates in Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine, as well as Jewish colonization in Palestine were wrought and wired by large projects of infrastructure construction, resource extraction, and economic development. Left unexplored, however, is the way these industrial and technological developments facilitated and were facilitated by arms manufacture and trafficking. This paper explores how late-imperial economic development co-constituted the emergence of an arms industry in Mandate Palestine. It argues that while Palestinians crafted arms through artisanal labor and utilized trade and drug smuggling routes across Bilad al-Sham that had predated mandatory borders to traffic arms, Jewish manufacturers capitalized on industrial concessions granted by the British administration that provided the materials, guise, and scientific knowledge required to establish a growing arms industry. The paper focuses on the two major monopoly concessions granted by the colonial government to Zionist interests in the 1920s – the concession to the Palestine Electricity Corporation (est. 1923) and the concession to the Palestine Potash Company in the Dead Sea (est. 1929) – and shows that they became strongholds of arms manufacturing. Potash played a pivotal but understudied role in the growth of the nascent arms industry: it was used to produce approximately 120,000 bombs by the late 1940s, affecting the results of the 1948 war. The integration of potash as a commodity in the manufacturing of arms significantly transformed the ecology and landscape of the Dead Sea. It also transformed Palestine’s academic environment: engineers, mechanics, technicians, and chemists trained at prestigious German institutions were prominent figures in Palestine’s burgeoning arms industry. Labs and workshops of the Technikum (later renamed Technion), Haifa’s technological institute, the Hebrew University, and the Ziv Institute (later renamed Weizmann Institute) produced gunpowder, tear gas, explosives, detonators, incendiary and smoke bombs, flares, and engraved coil for rifle and mortar barrels. Modern Israel’s military-industrial-environmental complex was born.