The paper centers on the Palestinian Arab town of Nablus, and the fraught debates over electrification that took place there in the years preceding the Great Arab Revolt, 1936-9. The Zionist-run and operated Palestine Electric Corporation held a monopolistic concession for the electrification of Palestine. As a result, the Palestinian community came to view electrification as the handmaiden of Zionist conquest. “If Rutenberg electricity lights the city of Nablus and Tulkarem,” one Nabulsi writer warned in 1932, referring to the general manager of the PEC, “one can say that Rutenberg and his works have conquered the land.” That electricity was only available through a Zionist company presented the Palestinian community with a dilemma. Besides the imperative to reject Zionism and British colonial rule, many Palestinians also aspired to “be modern," which to most included access to electrical power and light. As this paper will show, using previously unused sources from the Israel Electric Corp. Archives and elsewhere, the struggle over electrification in Nablus – within the town and between the town and the PEC – both reflected and remade the political fault lines of the Palestinian community in ways that would bear heavily on the Arab Revolt of the late ‘30s and beyond.