During the British mandate, cement and concrete gradually replaced stone as Palestine’s primary building materials. A period of unprecedented population growth, urbanization and immigration, the marriage between changing architecture, materials and booming construction dramatically changed Palestine’s landscape. Cement, and the concrete it was used to produce, were at the forefront of these changes. However, cement - an extremely fuel-hungry material - altered more than how Palestine was built. Focusing on the Nesher Cement factory in Haifa, the land’s sole cement producer at the time, this paper examines how changing construction materials and the energy transitions which enabled them, also altered the place of energy in Palestine’s history. Beginning operations in 1925, Nesher’s cement production relied on imported expertise, machinery and immigrant labor, as well as on huge quantities of imported coal. It thus marked a decisive change from the quarries and limekilns based on Palestinian Arab expertise, manual labor and local fuels, which stood at the heart of local stone construction. By 1927, the company’s expenses on fuel, primarily British coal, were roughly five times more than those of any other single industry in the land. Nesher’s owner, Michael Pollak, was himself a former Baku oil magnate who preserved his wealth after the Bolshevik revolution, thanks to his shares in the Shell oil company. Nesher’s cement was thus steeped in coal and oil from the start. Calling attention to the imperial politics and social consequences which flowed from the factory’s reliance on fossil fuels, this paper seeks to reevaluate the politics of building materials in Palestine in light of these energy transitions. Using archival materials, it evaluates three aspects of this apparent shift away from laboring bodies and biofuels: first, how Nesher’s management used the consumption of British coal to align itself with British imperial concerns and cement its monopoly; second, how Nesher’s coal-fueled kilns, rather than making manual labor or stone quarrying obsolete, reconfigured their place in the production process, rendering them “unskilled labor” for the supply of raw materials; and finally, how after World War II a global shortage in coal exacerbated a local housing crisis, particularly dire among Palestinian Arabs, which became known in the Arabic press as “the cement crisis” (azmat al-asman?). It shows how through cement production, fossil fuels became intertwined with national conflict, racialized hierarchies of labor and expertise, and the most basic needs.