“Palestine is a small country. Palestine is populated by Arabs.” With these two “stubborn facts,” the Austrian Zionist Nadja Stein opened her 1932 study on Zionism’s moral and material viability. To Stein, the issue came down to a single question. “Is there or is there not room in Palestine for Jewish settlement on an adequate scale if the native Arab population is not to be dispossessed of its land?” If there was not, Stein reasoned, the Zionists were “committing a wrong against others while appealing to the world to do justice to ourselves.” But by the same token, if there was enough room, then Zionism’s claim was unassailable. This paper will explore a powerfully influential mode of political analysis in the interwar period that sublimated the question of Zionism’s virtue into a question of political economy, and the vehicle for that sublimation – the technopolitical object of “economic absorptive capacity.” It will historicize a debate that ran alongside the more well-known arguments for and against Zionism. It was a quieter but arguably more important debate over “data,” which, as Stein put it, “were necessarily complicated and technical.” Indeed, once the conversation had been moved onto this technical terrain, arguments for or against Zionism took the form of debates over the precise size of the territory, the proportion of cultivable acreage, the dynamic potential of technological change, and more. In other words, this paper will shine a light on an underappreciated yet critical front in the conflict between Arabs and Jews in interwar Palestine, one with contemporary resonances in Palestine/Israel and beyond.