The British mandate period (1920-1948) was Palestine’s moment of oil. Crude oil first flowed to Palestine through the Kirkuk-Haifa-Tripoli pipelines in 1933, followed by the construction of the Haifa refinery in 1938-1942. During these years, oil transformed from a sparsely used energy source to Palestine’s primary and almost exclusive energy source. This paper will examine the introduction of two refined oil products: benzene and kerosene, and how their trajectories animated social and corporeal movements and delineated new divisions between private and public spheres. Unlike the vast literature emphasizing the history of oil production in oil-producing states, this paper seeks to shed light on the importance of oil consumption in the social history of Palestine, and the importance of Palestine to the history of oil. The social life of oil in Palestine will be examined by focusing on the advent of automobility fueled by benzene, and the transformation of household management practices following the increased use of kerosene. While kerosene was used in Palestine as of the second half of the nineteenth century for public illumination, in the twentieth century it was increasingly used for lighting, cooking, and heating within private homes. Benzene was the first product produced by the Haifa refinery in 1939 to meet the demands of the war, and its increased use in fueling motorized traffic facilitated new kinds of spatial and political relations. During the mandate era, Palestine was estimated to have on average one automobile per 100 inhabitants – six times more than Egypt, Transjordan and Iraq – making it the most motorized country in the Middle East. Motorized transport altered relations between urban and rural dwellers, between the mountain and the coastal plain, between Arabs and Jews, and between women and men. It also produced new kinds of political action and anti-colonial resistance. Concurrently, a differently refined petroleum product, kerosene, was increasingly fueling new domestic arrangements and altering family relations within private homes. By putting together accounts of automobile drivers, passengers, travel guides, housewives and memoirs of childhood homes, the paper will explore how technologies of refinement differentiated between new ways of movement through public space and between the privacy of the home, and animated new political repertoires.