In Lebanon, every war is also a test of what remains of society beyond the slogans, the rituals and the familiar invocations of national unity. The latest wave of fear, displacement and public commentary has revealed something that would be dishonest to soften or dodge: The scale of hatred circulating between communities is deeper than ever.

It is visible online, perceptible in daily conversations and increasingly accepted, without restraint or shame. It is the resurgence of wounds, resentments and forms of dehumanization that were never seriously dealt with after previous wars.

What is unfolding today cannot be reduced to a moral story pitting evil haters against good victims. Hatred is widespread throughout all communities. It takes different forms, draws from different memories, and is justified by different narratives, but it is there.

Each community can invoke its wounds, its betrayals, its fears and accumulated anger. None of this can be diffused by simple calls for civility.

What we are seeing goes beyond political polarization and the ordinary ugliness of exchanges on social media. We are witnessing the visible return of a question that Lebanon has been dodging for decades: After so many cycles of violence, unresolved grievances and mutual distrust, are people still able to live together?

Lebanon has gone through this time and again and has become very adept at restoring the appearance of normalcy. What it has never done, however, is confront what war leaves within each person and between communities.

The result is a society that periodically returns to a facade of coexistence while remaining deeply fractured in feelings, memory and imagination.

The model on which the country has relied for decades, built on silence, deals among elites and selective amnesia, may prevent immediate collapse and freeze the war.

What it cannot do is rebuild trust, establish a shared understanding of what happened, or prevent each new crisis from reviving, in uglier forms, the same buried resentments.

Truly plausible futures

This is why the customary language that usually follows wars sounds so hollow today. Calls for dialogue, for resilience, for national unity, no longer match the scale of the problem. Institutional coexistence does not produce social healing, and silence does not equal peace.

This also means that the classical repertoire of conflict resolution promoted by NGOs must be examined with clarity. Workshops, dialogues, youth exchanges, local peacebuilding programs, symbolic initiatives around art and sports... At best, all these can create small pockets of empathy.

But none of this is enough when measured against the scale of damage now laid bare. These tools were never designed to carry the weight of a society that has repeatedly avoided any real reckoning with its history, while letting sectarian entrepreneurs and warlords shape the collective imagination.

The question, therefore, is whether Lebanon is ready to consider the possibility that a large part of society will enter the postwar period with deeply incompatible narratives and an extremely low level of trust. This demands a more frank discussion about truly plausible futures.

The first is the well-known Lebanese pattern taken to its limit: a minimal political agreement and social and political coexistence without reconciliation. Daily interactions resume, the economy brings people back into contact, but underlying narratives remain intact.

Each community keeps its own version of events, its own hierarchy of victims, its own justifications. Public calm returns, but only as a mere pause; a postponement between two crises.

The second is that of gradual partition, whether called as such or reframed in more acceptable terms like federalism, advanced decentralization, community autonomy or territorial self-management.

For many, this appears less as an ideological project than as a conclusion born of exhaustion: If shared life has become so corrosive, maybe separation is the only realistic protection. This possibility must be examined coldly, without inherited reflexes from another era.

But separation does not automatically bring stability. To avoid becoming a long prelude to new wars, it would require clearly negotiated divisions of power, credible guarantees for minorities, mechanisms for economic viability and an accepted framework for managing movement, rights, resources and disputes. Without such conditions, federalism risks becoming just a polite word for fragmentation, and fragmentation a slower path toward violence.

The third scenario, the most dangerous, is that of total political paralysis, without even the superficial agreement that had always emerged after each episode of violence.

A political class incapable of producing the minimum institutional basis needed for the state's survival. Paralyzed institutions, an economy in further collapse and inherited memories exacerbated by war, without any space to absorb them, even temporarily. What had worked as an escape — precarious balances and arrangements among political groups, even based on impunity and forgetfulness — no longer recur.

Paralysis at the top translates to disintegration at the bottom: Communities close in on themselves and cross-sectarian solidarities wither. Normalized social violence becomes the only regulator of collective life that the state can no longer mediate.

Facing dehumanization

Avoiding this future requires much more than another clichéd photo of sheikhs and priests holding hands on the steps of the National Museum, accompanied by donor-funded reconciliation formulas.

It means recognizing that unresolved wars have social consequences that cannot be indefinitely buried under institutional arrangements. It means documenting what has been said, justified, normalized and incited during this period. It means confronting dehumanization as a political and social fact rather than treating it as an unfortunate outburst.

Above all, it requires a credible form of responsibility and accountability, carried by a state capable of giving people a reason to imagine their safety beyond sectarianism, because no serious social healing is possible as long as communities remain convinced that only their own camp can protect them.

Lebanon has spent decades mastering the art of turning the page without ever settling the accounts. It is precisely for this reason that it remains trapped in repetition. The next postwar period will likely be harsher, more mistrustful, more openly sectarian and more structurally unstable than those before.

The country could gradually disintegrate in fear, illegitimacy and everyday social tensions. This is the true danger now: a society entering its next chapter with less faith than ever in the very possibility of shared life.