I just listened to a fantastic episode of the Kerning Cultures podcast titled "Jerusalem Calling," about the cultural role of the multi-language Palestine Broadcasting Service in the twelve years before the Nakba. I would love to read more about technology's role in the relations between Arabs and Jews in Mandatory Palestine and the early state of Israel. Are there any particularly good books that I might be interested in? Thanks!
You are in luck, as there has been a lot of great new scholarship on the history of science in Israel-Palestine coming out lately, in addition to some good foundational texts that are still only a few decades old. One disclaimer is that for some of the scholars in this field, notably the historical geographers, articles are more common than monograph books -- if you are struggling to get access to academic articles due to paywalls, I'm not sure what resources I'm allowed to offer on this forum but happy to chat more directly.
Fredrik Meiton's Electrical Palestine Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation (University of California Press, 2019) discusses how the British colonial development of an electrical grid in Palestine contributed to the stratification of infrastructure between Jewish and Arab populations and the dispossession of Palestinians. It's received numerous book award nominations.
Tamar Novick's work is fabulous. She takes an unexpected approach to "technology" by looking at how pre-state and early state Jewish Zionist agricultural settlement used technology to maximize animal husbandry production to match the Biblical ideal of the land of Israel-Palestine as a verdant, fertile place (flowing with "milk and honey" literally -- her work is mostly on dairy production and apiaries). Her book is not out (I've been eagerly awaiting it) but you can easily find academic articles she's published and her full UPenn dissertation through Google. Omar Imseeh Tesdell's articles on the global transit of dryland agroecology and how the technologization of "arid farming" shaped both Palestinian and Jewish agricultural settlement in the lead up to 1948 are also fabulous.
Samar Alatout has numerous academic articles on the history of geology and hydrology and its role in Zionist state planning efforts. His 2009 article "Bringing abundance into environmental politics: Constructing a Zionist network of water abundance, immigration, and colonization" argues that unlike what we usually think of when we think of historic Palestine -- that the Zionists found a barren land and they then "made the desert bloom -- Zionist hydrologists and water engineers had a vested interest in portraying to the British Mandatory Palestine as a place with copious water resources. Only by portraying the land as a place of abundance, not scarcity, could they argue for increased Jewish immigration quotas. He analyzes the political dimensions of these technoscientific arguments and their successes and failures. His chapter in the excellent 2011 book Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa (worth a read overall even for the non-Israel-Palestine chapters) considers US scientific and political expertise's role in water management in the region.
Both of Nadia Abu El-Haj's books are definitely worth your time. Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (University of Chicago Press, 2001) was a pretty formational book in showing how the formation of scientific disciplines and inquiry -- in this case, archaeology -- was necessary for Israel to naturalize itself as a state and a nation. Her second book The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (2012) goes a bit farther afield than just Israel-Palestine to look more broadly at the history of how Jewish scientists in Israel built up genetic genealogy as a science in the 1950s -- even as some of them fled or survived the eugenic racial science project of Nazi genocide.