The paper examines the grant and implementation of the concession to electrify the Sub-district of Jaffa in the 1920s. It argues that the coupling of technology and politics produced new mechanisms of power, which were crucial in determining the history of mandate-era Palestine and beyond. As the first commercial concession granted by the British Mandatory Government as well as the first attempt at electrification in Palestine, the Jaffa Concession was hugely important. There were profits to be made from electrification, at least according to some observers. But its signal importance stemmed from the fact, widely acknowledged at the time, that electrical power was easily convertible into – indeed, was inseparable from – political power. The history of electricity in Palestine has so far gone virtually unexamined. Contemporary scholarship seems largely to have forgotten that electrification was “the main economic pivot of the Zionist programme” in the interwar period, as one lone historian put it over fifteen years ago. By contrast, the importance of electrical power was not lost on the protagonists of 1920s Palestine. Electrification provided one of the earliest sites of contestation over Britain’s policy of promoting a Jewish National Home. The Zionists deliberately used their bid for electrification rights as a means of bolstering support for the overall scheme of the National Home. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Arabs, no less aware of the multiple forms of power bound up with electricity, campaigned against the Zionist initiative on those same terms. Using records culled from the Palestine Government, the press, and the Israel Electric Company Archives the present paper seeks to map the way material properties of specific technologies intervene in human history by shaping the physical world in specific ways, with the goal of showing that like electricity, political power is channeled through material structures, whose properties determine their flow.