From The Observer, Rowan Williams on the Middle East situation:The ethical tradition that has developed around the conduct and aims of war is profoundly discouraging about definitive solutions which justify any amount of interim suffering and devastation - which is why terrorist tactics are always immoral without qualification. But even in the deployment of legitimate defence, one of the historical moral criteria is whether it has in view an attainable, limited and realistic goal. A conflict fought on an all-or-nothing basis, rather than looking to measurable advantages and negotiated adjustments of interest, is morally problematic. To create a civil vacuum in the hope that it will guarantee total victory is to court both practical and moral defeat.
A statement from Hizbollah about its prisoners, an easing of the blockade to guarantee safe passage for World Food Programme convoys and supplies for the hospitals of Lebanon and Gaza - these are not huge and complex matters. But if they save even a handful of lives, they are not wasted. And they will represent just a small sign that somewhere there is a shared future to be negotiated for the ordinary people of the region ... Israeli, Palestinian or Lebanese.
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