In the decade and a half following the Palestinian Nakba and Israel’s independence, the new country’s stone quarries became political, social, and economic flashpoints between the state and its most marginalized populations. Seldom mentioned in the historiography, quarries nonetheless stood at the center of several of the period’s most crucial junctures: from the Kafr Qasim massacre in 1956, through the discriminatory incorporation of recent Mizrahi Jewish immigrants into the workforce, often at the expense of the country’s Palestinian citizens, to the latter’s struggles against land confiscations and the state-directed policies of spatial “Judaization”. Meanwhile, stone quarries’ products were also integral to one of the state’s most central endeavors: carrying out massive construction operations to house unprecedented waves of Jewish immigration and to establish dominance over newly acquired territory. Stone quarries after 1948 were, in other words, critical nodes both in Zionism’s unfinished colonial enterprise and in the struggles of those who opposed it, or simply sought to survive in its shadows. It is no accident then that two of the period’s defining cultural products coming from the state’s margins, Mahmoud Darwish’s by now iconic poem “Identity Card” (1964), and Ehud Ben Ezer’s somewhat forgotten novel “The Quarry” (1963), drew a direct link between lifeworlds rooted in the quarry and between the Palestinian and Mizrahi sense of self, respectively. This paper navigates these political, social, and cultural junctures to explore how between 1948-1964, quarries emerged as testing grounds for the limits of Israeli sovereignty, bastions of Palestinian self-sufficiency, and spaces for the articulation of a new Mizrahi collective. A combination of factors at the nexus of ecology, racial-thought, political economy, and labor shaped this process. First, the geology of Palestine/Israel and the settlement patterns of Palestinians and Zionist Jews prior to 1948, meant that even after 1948 the majority of the land’s building stone deposits remained in predominantly Arab areas. Secondly, Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews were racialized by Zionist elites as inclined towards physically difficult and supposedly menial forms of labor, of which stone quarrying - previously a coveted local expertise among Zionist “pioneers” - became a prime example. Finally, post-1948 movement restrictions and land expropriation meant that many among the largely rural remaining Palestinian communities, who in the past relied primarily on agriculture for their livelihood, had to radically reconfigure their relationship to their surroundings. For some among them, the quarry seemed to offer a potential remedy to their plight.