In 1921, the British mandatory government in Palestine granted an exclusive, countrywide concession to electrify Palestine. The concessionaire, a Zionist engineer by the name of Pinhas Rutenberg, soon set to work realizing his grand scheme: a hydro-electrical power station at the confluence of the Jordan and Yarmuk rivers. The goal of this paper is to explore the building of Palestine’s first and only hydro-electrical power plant, and the critical role it played in creating a national electric grid in mandatory Palestine. Naharayim, as the plant was called, was a hydro-electrical machine made up of organic and inorganic elements. Envisioning and building it involved a calculus of environmental, technological, economic, and political variables. And it relied on various and seemingly incongruous forms of expertise. At every step of the process, Rutenberg’s undertaking had to contend with competing claims, emanating from the Yishuv, the Palestinian Arab community, and the non-human environment. Drawing on records from the Palestine Government, Jewish and Arab press and political organizations, and the archives of the Israel Electric Corp., the paper looks at a key instance of negotiating nature, technology, and people. By generating electricity and distributing it over an imagined Jewish national space, the imaginary acquired a material dimension. Thus emerged a national space capable of hosting a number of national objects, such as an economy, industry, agriculture, politics, and culture. The paper will show how the character of those national objects was shaped in critical ways by the negotiations involved in producing them, while also influencing Arab-Jewish relations in ways that reverberates through to the present.