The eruption of violence in Lebanon last week which cost seven lives is a chilling reminder of the country's bloody sectarian history and the tightrope that both opposition and government walk. The international donor conference in Paris on Thursday, which pledged $7.6 billion to reconstruction, was completely overshadowed by the continuing deadlock and possibility of civil war.
"What are we doing? No one can help a country where its own people can't help themselves," the western-backed prime minister Fouad Siniora stated in Paris. "We have to set an example for those people who came from all over and are watching Lebanon that we are trying to build a country, not a battlefield."
In the lethal cocktail that is Lebanese politics, the building of a country has mostly, however, played second fiddle to the regional strategic games in which its parties are proxies to foreign powers: the US, Syria, Iran and Israel.
Currently Mr Siniora, and the March 14th alliance that formed in reaction to the 2005 assassination of ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri, clings to notional power with western backing, while Hizbullah and its Shia supporters hold the streets following the withdrawal of opposition members from cabinet. Hizbullah is demanding a third of the places in a national government and, crucially, a blocking minority system to prevent being outvoted, particularly on its own decomissioning. It would also give it a veto on the formation of a tribunal to try suspects in the killing of Hariri. That issue is particularly toxic for the governing majority and its US backers which believe Hizbullah is trying to get Syria off the hook.
To break the logjam may require delicate negotiations and a subtle sequencing or "choreography" - as in Northern Ireland, nothing will be agreed until everything is agreed and the parties take final steps together. An Arab League road map could hold the key, provided that the present tension recedes and allows cooler heads to prevail. The priority must be agreeing a draft statute for a tribunal acceptable to all parties which guarantees its independence. That may mean the Siniora government swallowing a bitter pill in accepting the tightening of a loose definition of command responsibility, making it perhaps more difficult to implicate Syria in the murder.
Concurrently with signing up to such an agreement the parties should relaunch a national government with a place in it for Hizbullah and with a mechanism to protect minorities.
Crucially such choreography requires both the US and Syria to take one step backwards - the US to refrain from pushing Mr Siniora into confrontation with Hizbullah and to accept the necessity of power-sharing; Syria to accept Lebanon's right, acknowledged explicitly by Hizbullah, to try Hariri's killers. On the streets in the last few days leaders from both communities have appealed for calm and national unity. A real commitment to peace will, however, be tested in their flexibility in the dialogue their country desperately needs.