“There were no mines, there was no border, there were no border crossings, wire, they put wire. Yes, there was none, they just put it the other day. When they occupied in ‘48 there was no wire. Only stones…They came and had cars, tanks, we did not see that before. We had regular soldiers, and they were placed somewhere. When people in the village would have a fight, they would go and see the Lebanese police. There was one in every village. Here there was also one station of the Lebanese army, after 1948.” (65-year old produce vendor from Blida, interviewed 2009) This paper reflects on the changing nature of border control and everyday life in south Lebanese frontier villages following the establishment of Israel in 1948. The excerpt above is from a south Lebanese villager from Blida, situated in the immediate proximity of what are today the depopulated and destroyed Palestinian border villages of Nabi Yusha, Qadas, and Malkiyeh, three of what are now called al-Qura al-Saba?a (“seven villages”). The French and British mandate authorities competed over these seven predominantly Shi?a villages in a quest for territorial aggrandizement. Like other nearby border villages, Blida had been transferred from Ottoman to British to French rule. On the fringes of both the French and British Mandates, it often changed hands between the two, or was even subject to simultaneous and overlapping British and French rule into the 1940s. Furthermore, it was occupied and controlled by Israel in two periods, first during the 1948–49 Nakba, and second during the Lebanese civil war between 1978–2000. Based on oral histories collected in the south Lebanese frontier villages, this paper aims to situate the Nakba in a historical context of ongoing border changes between Lebanon and Palestine. One of the major goals of this paper is to explore the strong links and active networks that existed between south Lebanon and north Palestine through the stories of the village communities. It looks at and beyond the imposed boundaries through the eyes of the people that were directly affected by them. It addresses the effects of multiple systems of rule and constant spatial reorganizations of everyday life and forced migrations on the formation of political subjectivities of the population.