While interviewing Abu Jibran, an influential communist and organizer from a south Lebanese border village, he shared his first experiences with the harsh reality of the border after the French and English demarcated it. His stories tell how border police, first English, then Lebanese, and later Israeli, detained and beat up residents that did not comply. Abu Jibran and I were sitting in his remaining plot of land, just a few meters above us was a large Israeli military outpost. Abu Jibran recalled: “[Some villagers] came to me...They told me ‘a tractor is plowing your land.’ I went there and found a Jewish officer. I spoke English to him. I used to speak English more than Arabic. I said, look what are you doing? He said what is this your business, I am implementing the map. Yes, but this is my land, don’t you see wheat is planted on it? I inherited it through grandfather to grandfather and have planted it. How are you implementing a map? Whose map are you implementing? So I went and submitted a complaint to the Lebanese army. One more meaningless than the other.” In his stories, Abu Jibran repeatedly voiced his frustration with the Lebanese Army, especially in incidents where it would violently force citizens to comply with the new borderline, without considering people’s land ownership. Then, Abu Jibran got up and walked towards his former land to show me what used to be his, and what is now an inaccessible strip wrapped in barbed wire filled with land mines and where the military base is located. This paper is based on oral history interviews I collected during 2009 and 2022. It studies multiple and constant spatial reorganizations of everyday life and forced migrations under the shifting borders and systems of rule in south Lebanese frontier villages. Many of vital economic and social interlinkages ceased with the formation of the Lebanese-Palestinian boundary demarcation following the 1923 Paulet Newcombe agreement, and severed especially after the establishment of Israel in 1948. How did constant changing borders and authorities form people’s political identity? This paper looks at and beyond the imposed boundaries through the eyes of the people directly affected by it. The abandonment of the (Lebanese) state is a major theme that was voiced repeatedly in my interviews. It was one of the reasons that my informants brought forward for supporting the Palestinian resistance.