Throughout much of the twentieth century, construction and the ability to build were among the central material and ideological axes upon which historical developments, national politics, and domination in Israel/Palestine hinged. At the same time, work in the land’s construction industries - including both building construction and the production of building materials - emerged as consistently unsafe. Construction work exposed workers to physical injury, disability, and death at rates which work safety professionals repeatedly categorized as disproportionate to other industries and to the construction industry elsewhere. Construction’s increasing reliance on marginalized populations as its core labor force - placing them rather than others in harm’s way - was instrumental to enabling these consistently hazardous working conditions. This was especially true after the Palestinian Nakba and the establishment of Israel in 1948, when the industry’s most dangerous jobs frequently employed racialized and marginalized Palestinian Arabs and Mizrahi Jews. Labor and economic historians, historical sociologists, and political economists have provided ample evidence of the construction industry’s continued significance and of the post-1948 proletarianization of Palestinians and Mizrahim, which ushered many Palestinian and Mizrahi men into construction work, primarily as so-called “unskilled” labor. However, scholars have seldom examined the changing cultural, political, and social impacts of the risk and harm which workers in Palestine/Israel’s construction industry faced. This paper uses memoirs, archival records, press coverage, oral history interviews, and literary and cinematic representations to examine how workers in Israel/Palestine’s construction industry, their families, and their communities experienced dangerous and exploitative work and its tolls, between 1930-1993. It juxtaposes these narrative sources with contemporaneous scientific discourses of occupational hygiene, work safety and risk, whose quantitative and statistical emphases typically ignored such narratives of pain, danger and disability, and glossed over their attendant political significance. Drawing upon works in political ecology, disability studies and the history of pain, the paper shows how divisions of labor in Palestine/Israel served as vehicles of slow violence and population debilitation, on the one hand, and how pain, injury, occupational disease and accidental death shaped the experiences and subjectivities of construction workers, their families, and their communities, on the other. The narratives of pain, risk, injury, and loss which these individuals and communities produced and inspired, I argue, frequently operated outside of, and against the dominant strands of colonial and national politics.