My paper examines how sand produces imageries and realities that both solidify and undermine power relations. Between 1967 to 1973 Israel embarked upon a massive fortification campaign in the Sinai Peninsula. It constructed a line of defence stretching from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea along the sandy embanked walls of the Suez Canal. The “Bar-Lev Line,” as it later came to be known, was designed to be the state’s ultimate barrier on a body of water that epitomized notions of imperial domination. Recounting the planning and building process of this massive fortification, this paper shows how sand was shaped to act not only as a construction material but also as a substance sustaining a political fantasy where acts of conquest are normalized. Simultaneously, however, sand’s fluidic nature – continuously ‘on the move’ between shapes, structures, and volumes – challenged the effort to regularize an occupied space. By focusing on Israel’s fortification campaign, then, the paper examines how dreams of geopolitical impregnability are formed, sustained, or dissolved. An analysis of how sand ‘acts’ is also a call to read it as a matter that matters, in the dynamic relations between people, places and things.