Forty years ago, the eminent literary critic Harold Bloom published a fantasy novel titled The Flight to Lucifer, which by most accounts—the author’s included—is a poor piece of work. Evident in the book is the influence of David Lindsay’s 1920 novel A Voyage to Arcturus, a work that Bloom claims “infected me personally with more intensity and obsessiveness than all the works of greater stature and resonance of our time.” Michael Weingrad argues that Bloom’s novel might best be seen “not as a weak rewriting of Lindsay but rather as a failed struggle against” another professor of English literature-turned-fantasy writer: C.S. Lewis.

[In a 1982 book], Bloom holds up Lindsay as a counter to the [self-consciously Christian] fantasy writers known collectively as the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. [His] argument amounts to a preference for romantic rebellion to religious tradition. . . .

In The Flight to Lucifer, Bloom, [like Lewis in his Perelandra], attempts a kind of rewriting of Genesis. His planet features versions of the biblical flood, the tower of Babel, and Nimrod the hunter, but with a familiar Gnostic twist: the biblical God is actually a satanic demiurge, and the characters who defy his authority are emissaries of truth. Unfortunately, in Bloom’s hands, these Gnostic inversions are repetitive and dramatically sterile. . . .

Judaism does not come out much better than Christianity, by the way, at least if Bloom’s portrait of Lucifer’s Mandaeans, “this fearful, narrow, aggressive remnant of a people” consumed with “the common quarrel about possession of land,” means what I think it does.

All in all, The Flight to Lucifer is less of an homage to Lindsay than an anti-Perelandra. And yet, despite Bloom’s intentions, it demonstrates that what Bloom calls “Promethianism” is, well, kind of narcissistic. It turns out that Gnostic rebellion is not especially interesting, at least in Bloom’s dramatization; it seems rather adolescent and self-obsessed. . . .

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.