The rest of the dislocated have dispersed everywhere in Lebanon, renting apartments or sheltering with family. These are very early days, but if you want to begin pondering the long term ramifications of this war, the demographic dimension would be one of the more consequential for a country with a rather prickly sectarian character. Many Shiites may want to relocate permanently from, say, the southern suburbs and adjacent environs, like Sheyyah. The 1975-1990 Civil War did a somewhat thorough cleansing of Lebanon’s mixed geographies; this war may very well enrich them again –– for better if we have learned history’s lessons.

I am not sure, though, what the government was referring to when it announced months ago that it has an emergency plan in place. I am not sure either how an incapacitated government could manage any kind of plan. When a journalist recently asked our minister of energy, Monsieur Walid Fayad, about the plan B his team has put together, he took pity on her before casually lamenting that the ministry doesn’t have a plan A, let alone a plan B. The fellow has become one of Lebanese’s favorite destinations for comic relief.

The gulf between this colossal human suffering and woeful government inadequacy, longstanding in Lebanese life, has never been more alarming. Simply on its own terms, the gap between the two strongly suggests terrifying prospects for a country that already can barely hang on to anything tangible beyond its name. But ominously, other very worrying fissures are beginning to carve deeper into the body politic of this brutalized nation.

Since the beginning of its massive escalations in Lebanon, Israel’s has been a multi-pronged attack strategy against the Shiite sect: exacting retribution on Hezbollah and its members; inflicting huge suffering on the community at large well beyond the movement’s base of support; and provoking suspicion and bitterness between this hounded sect and other Lebanese constituencies by targeting any building or neighborhood that might host displaced Shiites the Jewish state identifies as so-called Party of God connections.

It is hard to describe how shunned and maligned Hezbollah’s grassroots feel. Theirs now is a sense of siege. This is a fellowship that for decades had drawn their strength from the resistance’s political and military dominance. In the hundreds of thousands, they find themselves now pummeled, orphaned, and adrift without its protections. In full view of their unedifying condition, Hezbollah would be hard pressed to argue otherwise, and it shouldn’t want to.

Very serious security failures and strategic blunders have left an already beleaguered Lebanon in a dire predicament. Quite aside from where we, as Lebanese, stand on Israel’s ambitions in the south and its genocide in Gaze, the resistance movement’s decision to support the Palestinian people was entirely its own, and so then is the responsibility for the fallout. It should therefore welcome a searching and honest conversation about the clearly untenable tension between its raison d’être, however legitimate, and our frightening precariousness as a people –– one from which Hezbollah itself is not innocent.

But this kind of earnest conversation is easier said than done. On paper, we have a state, but we actually don’t. We have leaders, but we really don’t. We have foreign friends, but not quite. We have an existential interest in addressing the taproots of our intractable problems, but neither the energy nor the inclination to do so.

And as usual, the Party of God’s enemies have been quick to the trigger. They could barely contain their schadenfreude when the pagers and walkie-talkies exploded in early September. After the successive Israeli assassinations that did away with Hezbollah’s entire senior leadership, they let it all rip. In certain quarters sectarian, in others petty, still in others outright malignant, they differ in motivation but meet in their curious conviction that Hezbollah is breathing its last. This might seem mystifying, when the powerful group remains armed to the teeth, boasts more than a 40,000 strong army, still has impressive financial resources, continues to enjoy Iran’s warm embrace, is fiercely resisting the IDF’s ground invasion in the south in spite of the heavy body blows, and lobbing increasingly more precise projectiles deeper into Israel.