In his 1989 landmark Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Gershon Shafir placed land acquisition and labor employment as the central tenets that made continued Zionist settlement in Palestine viable. The book argued forcefully that Zionism adopted a strategy of economic separatism, not due to ideology, but rather as a result of its encounter with the land and labor markets in late-Ottoman Palestine. In a poignant critique of the book, Zachary Lockman countered that the success of Zionism cannot be attributed solely to the largely futile campaigns for Hebrew labor and land reclamation, but rather to various forms of coercion and violent conflict exercised by the Zionist movement and by the British colonial state. In recent decades, new scholarship has argued that these social developments were largely shaped by material and technological processes. This paper builds on these accounts yet offers an understudied lens for analyzing colonial relations in Palestine. It argues that the roots of Jewish-Arab separatism should be located not only in land and labor markets or in colonial coercion mechanisms, but rather in the material infrastructure that connected or segregated them. The paper explores mandate Palestine’s road-paving boom, in which the length of paved roads was extended almost six-fold. It focuses on the military roads program, which was the largest operation of road construction ever undertaken in Palestine. The program was part of the British effort to extinguish the great Arab revolt (1936-1939) by constructing roads that connected Jewish colonies, in order to bypass routes controlled by rebels. The paper argues that the various ways in which this militarized road infrastructure rearranged the mobility of labor, militants, and commodity trade were key factors in enabling the Jewish Yishuv’s survival during the revolt and in instituting spatial segregation between Arabs and Jews. Highly important was the interface between military roads and agricultural ecologies. The military roads program consisted mainly of asphalting existing gravel roads that used to flood in winter, enabling year-round mobility. This created significant economic and social opportunities for the transportation of two of Palestine’s chief crops: oranges and olives, which are harvested during the rainy season. These opportunities were unevenly spaced between Jewish colonies and Palestinian towns and villages. Unlike studies on communal formation and relations that seem to assume these processes occur in vacuum, the paper addresses the physical arteries and (mobile and stationary) spaces that perform this social function.