The lack of a state, and the weakness of Palestinian institution building, continue to be foregone conclusions in scholarship on British ruled Palestine. Scholars have described early twentieth century Palestinian thought and practice on the notion of the state as either paralyzed by the twin forces of a Zionist emphasis on progress and a British emphasis on tradition on the one hand, or else mute and unable to articulate demands for a state form on the other. Indeed, a tenuous and contradictory relationship to the British colonial government deeply marked the colonial condition for Palestinian political and economic elites. Yet paralysis and muteness do not adequately address the complexities of Palestinian attempts to access state power in the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed this period was a time of intensive Palestinian efforts to formulate national and daily demands in new languages vis-?-vis the colonial government. The archival record reveals that the idea of objectivity and the power of "facts and figures" were central to these new languages. Drawing on petitions, institutional documents, and memoirs, this paper focuses on the figure of Rashid al-Haj Ibrahim in order to explore Palestinian attempts to access power, forge new understandings of the "objective," and imagine the promise of a state. Writing his autobiography, Defending Haifa and the Problem of Palestine, the former president of the Haifa Arab Chambers of Commerce was at pains to explain that the Palestinians had not idly sat by in the face of national extinction. The Chambers, he wrote, were one of the means he and his cohort had used in their attempts to face down another nationalist enterprise in mandate Palestine, one that was larger and more powerful than theirs. He approached this mission from various perspectives as a landowner, a prominent merchant, a leader of the Islamic Society, a newspaper editor, a member of the pan-Arab Istiqlal Party, a businessman, a banker, and a Chamber activist. Ibrahim, and men like him, who could occupy various seemingly contradictory but nevertheless overlapping social and economic categories, advocated for representation on various governmental bodies where they hoped to build their own institutional capacities. For these Palestinians, the colonial state was the address for crafting national institutions; it was a site of participation and opposition, possibility and exclusion.