Starting in the turn of the twentieth century, the Ottoman administration, and later the British and French mandatory rulers, marked the eastward shift of sand dunes along the southeastern Mediterranean coasts as an environmental concern – an expanding desert devouring fertile land. Economic “development” through the expansion of agricultural production thus required the fixation of dunes through state afforestation projects. While historians have addressed imperial campaigns of dune-afforestation before, they largely overlooked the way that these acts systematically extinguished indigenous ownership and usufruct rights, expropriated sands as state domains, and transferred these lands’ “reclamation” as concessions to colonial companies. European theories of the Fertile Crescent’s natural history justified these practices by portraying Arab agricultural and livestock cultivation methods as the historical causes for sand drift. Removing Arab populations away from coastal sand stretches was thus constructed as an ecological strategy. By exploring the environmental and legal framing of coastal sands as wastelands, deprived of ownership, and hostile to cultivation, this paper exposes the Levantine coast’s reconfiguration as a land reserve qualified solely for modern urban expansion. The paper shows that vast swaths of land and building space were injected this way into the Levantine real estate market, freeing the region’s coastal cities from their premodern boundaries to develop horizontally and vertically into expansionary-capitalistic behemoths by the middle of the twentieth century. As a result, within the formation of Middle Eastern nation-states post-WWII, the coastline became the platform for both consolidating state power and defining the conditions of statelessness, giving rise simultaneously to the most luxurious urban centers and the most miserable refugee shelters.