This paper applies an infrastructural approach to the construction of a new settler-colonial racial order in Palestine in the aftermath of World War I. It treats motorized mobility, with its supporting infrastructure of paved roads, as a key mechanism by which new subject-positions and modes of collective action were introduced into the Palestinian social landscape. The system of roads in existence in Palestine before the war reflected an animal-powered mobility regime. The war severely disrupted this regime, leaving in its wake massive numbers of human and animal casualties. It also brought a new form of transportation to the Palestinian landscape - motorized vehicles, mostly military ones at first but increasingly civilians ones as well. The paper begins by delineating the different combinations of private and public enterprises that emerged in order to facilitate the domestication of motorized transportation. It tracks particular material assemblages as they pass between military and civilian usage, as when military vehicles were repurposed to serve as the foundation of a fledgling public transportation system. Yet the encounter between motorized vehicles and unpaved roads quickly marked the latter as inadequate, producing frequent stoppages and breakages. The British colonial state thus enrolled itself in a large scale project of road construction. However, the strict financial constraints under which the colonial state operated limited its ability to enact its technopolitical vision. Starting from the early 1920’s, British officers began relying on the coerced labor of Palestinian prisoners for road-construction. Other state-led ventures employed the cheap contracted labour of Arab villagers and itinerant workers, particularly women and children. A 1926 ordinance provided a legal framework for the coercion of whole Arab rural communities into road-construction work. The Jewish settlement movement, on the other hand, was able to enact semi-private road construction ventures using private capital flows. Through consecutive financial crises of the 1920’s, these ventures provided much-needed wage labor to the swelling ranks of Eastern European immigrants, and served as key sites for their incorporation into the centralized organizational structure of the Yishuv. These divergent mechanisms of road construction help explain the spatial extent of the road system in Palestine by the late 1920’s. The paper concludes a discussion of the utility of the term “infrastructural violence.” It argues that such violence should be seen as taking place within a shared repertoire alongside more spectacular forms of communal violence, illustrating this point with evidence from the anti-Jewish riots of 1929.