Would even paradise itself be worth the suffering of a single tortured child?

There is a question in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov that has haunted me ever since I first read it in my 20s. The question is put by Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alyosha, during a conversation over dinner about God, and the problem of evil, and the viability of religious belief in a world filled with gratuitous cruelty and suffering.

Ivan, whose faith is bedevilled by doubt, outlines for the devout Alyosha his rage at the injustice of God and the iniquity of men. He describes, at length and in terrible detail, a case he has read about a five-year-old girl who was mercilessly tortured by her parents. Such cases of child abuse he copies down from the newspapers, he tells Alyosha, as though he were building evidence for a case against God. The details of the torture are upsetting enough, but it’s the invocation of the child’s uncomprehending tears, and her appeals for help from God, that pierce the reader’s heart. Such evil, Ivan says, is claimed as necessary by Christians, because it is the price of free will, and of the possibility of goodness. Without evil, there can be no redemption, and no paradise.

And then comes the question that has always haunted me. “Imagine,” says Ivan, “that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears –would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Tell me the truth.”

Alyosha answers immediately that he would not agree. Even paradise itself, the redemption of all humanity, would not be worth the suffering of that little girl.

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The dispatcher kept Hind on the line for over three hours, during which time she was trapped in the car, alone with the bodies of her dead relatives, and terrified that the IDF soldiers in the tank who had killed them would kill her too

This question of Ivan Karamazov’s has been on my mind recently, as the world has filled each day with images of suffering children. It came to me with particular insistence last week, when I read a report in The Washington Post about the last hours of a six-year-old Palestinian girl named Hind Rajab.

[ Gazans venting anger against Hamas in wake of death and destruction ]

Last January, Hind was in a car with five family members, attempting to flee encroaching Israeli forces in Gaza City, when they came under fire from a tank. The other occupants of the vehicle, Hind’s aunt and uncle and cousins, were killed. (Her mother and older siblings fled on foot, apparently believing Hind would be safer in the car.)

Hind’s 15-year-old cousin, Layan Hamadeh, had called the Palestinian Red Crescent, to say that her parents and siblings had been killed and that Israeli soldiers were continuing to fire on them. Layan herself was then killed, and the line went dead. When a Red Crescent dispatcher named Rana Faqih called back, Hind answered. The dispatcher kept her on the line for over three hours, during which time she was trapped in the car, alone with the bodies of her dead relatives, and terrified that the IDF soldiers in the tank who had killed them would kill her too.

There are moments in the recording of the call that are nearly too much to bear. This exchange from the transcript, even as I type it, overwhelms me with sadness and horror:

Hind Rajab: Come take me. You will come and take me?

Rana Faqih: Do you want me to come and take you?

Hind Rajab: I’m so scared. Please come. Please call someone to come and take me.

Rana Faqih: Okay, dear, I will come and take you.

As night draws in, trapped and cowering in the mangled car, Hind tells Rana that she is afraid of the dark, and that she wants to be taken away. They pray together, the woman saying a few words and the little girl then repeating them, her voice thin and small and frightened. (“I can’t describe her voice to you,” said Faqih in a recent interview with Al Jazeera. “It was a child begging for help.”)

Here is what is believed to have happened next. The ambulance finally arrived, and the Israeli soldiers fired a US-made artillery shell directly at it, killing the two paramedics just metres from the child they had come to help. And then they killed the child herself. In the days that followed the discovery by relatives of the bodies, the massacre became international news; the Israeli government denied having any information about it, claiming that its soldiers were in any case never present at the scene.

[ Israel must be firmly told ‘enough is enough’ ]

Last week’s report in The Washington Post, employing forensic reviews by ballistics and weapons experts, confirmed that IDF armoured vehicles were, in fact, in the vicinity of the car where Hind’s body was found, and that the damage to the family’s vehicle was consistent with rounds fired by Israeli tanks. (In response to the report, the IDF repeated its claim that its forces were not in the area, though it provided no comment on any of the specific expert findings.)

When I think about Hind, I think of the little girl in The Brothers Karamazov –– this ‘small creature’, as Ivan puts it, ‘who cannot even comprehend what is being done to her, in a vile place, in the dark and the cold’

I am tempted to say that it is impossible to imagine Hind Rajab’s suffering in her final hours. But I don’t know that that’s true. What’s true, perhaps, is that I can’t face imagining it.

[ Trapped and starving, two families in Gaza Strip try to keep their children alive ]

When I think about Hind, I think of the little girl in The Brothers Karamazov –– this “small creature”, as Ivan puts it, “who cannot even comprehend what is being done to her, in a vile place, in the dark and the cold, [who] beats herself on her strained little chest with her tiny fist and weeps... for God to protect her.”

And I have a question, a version of Ivan Karamazov’s, for the people who believe that Hind’s death, tragic though it might have been, was in service of a just and necessary cause. Imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of a safe and secure nation, unthreatened by its enemies. And imagine that to construct that edifice you must inevitably and unavoidably torture and kill a little six-year-old girl, and raise your edifice on her unrequited tears. Would you agree, on such conditions, to be the architect? Would even paradise be worth her suffering?