If the bombings, shifting from one area to another in the streets of Lebanon, are meant to spread a state of panic and reciprocal fear – i.e. bluntly put, each sect's fear of the other, and the fear of going through the "other" neighborhoods and districts – then these bombings have achieved their goal to a great extent. The climate now prevailing in Lebanon is that this bombing was a response to the other, a casualty from one sect in exchange for a casualty from the other. Such talk is as regrettable as it is painful. Yet it is frank talk that should be spoken out under these circumstances, so as for our minds to awaken before it is too late. It does not matter if the final analysis is that the perpetrator is one and the same, and that the intent is one and the same – to spread strife, and to drive the country into the flames of the sectarian war that is imported straight from Syria. This fear reigning between one sect and the other, which we had supposedly buried at what we had assumed to be the end of the Civil War in Lebanon, has returned today, as acute and bloody as it ever was. Even in the midst of that Civil War, acts of terror through suicide-bombings had not become widespread, nor ever reached the hearts of neighborhoods and districts. On the contrary, members of each sect used to feel that they would be safe, once they had entered the "boundaries of their own district". Indeed, the lines of demarcation were clearly and accurately defined, and anyone who would breach them would be exposed to being stopped, and often killed. What is most dangerous about the events that Lebanon is witnessing today is that they are reminding us of those dark days – with their closed districts and clear boundaries. Indeed, with the so-called "security measures" that followed the bombing in Dahieh, as well as the events witnessed in some of the neighborhoods of Tripoli, in the wake of the bombings at the two mosques, and the instances of the IDs of passersby being scrutinized on the basis of their sectarian affiliation (or rather, to be accurate, their confession), the door has been wide open to the "cleansing" of districts and the prohibition of intermixing between sects, which should be considered natural in a country whose citizens are supposed be living together, and where moving between cities and districts is an ordinary matter that should not be impeded by any obstacles. One of the most dangerous reasons being cited in discussing the necessity for this kind of autonomous security is the lack of trust, everyone's lack of trust, in the ability of state services to provide security and protect the country and its citizens. On one hand, this is due to the fact that the citizens' trust in the State has been has been shaken throughout history in Lebanon, and also to the negative effects of sectarian division in the country, on the performance of security services, each of them being accused of sectarian alignment with one side against the other. And when the Interior Minister reaches the point of justifying the measures that were taken in the neighborhoods of Beirut's Southern Suburb (Dahieh), in the wake of the recent bombing there, one can only imagine the effect of such talk on the trust of citizens in the security that the State should be providing them. In a situation such as this, it becomes difficult to ask any one district not to resort to taking its own autonomous security measures, at a time when such measures are being allowed in another district. Of course, the Lebanese in any district cannot be blamed when they seek after any means they have to protect their own lives and those of their families. It is true that this should initially have been the responsibility of the State, but a powerless and weak state whose will has been hijacked is what opens the door to citizens to provide their own security. And that is the fastest track to total collapse – the collapse of the State, followed by the collapse of the image of a country described as the home of coexistence. Perhaps the question one should ask here is: would it have been possible for such coexistence to be spared, amid the flames of confessional wars that surround this small country? Much has been written theorizing about the notion of "dissociation" from the Syrian crisis. Yet the bitter truth we are now facing is that all parties have become deeply and blatantly implicated in this crisis, even if at varying degrees. The state had been required to impose such "dissociation" on everyone, in order to save the country and protect its citizens. But where would such a state come from, when the current state has been tailored to the parties drowning in Syria's flames and built of their very flesh?
