The Canadian Jewish fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay recently published his fourteenth novel. In an essay on Kay’s oeuvre, Michael Weingrad notes many Jewish themes and occasional Jewish characters. These perhaps appear most explicitly in two of his books, which, like several others, are set in fictionalized versions of historical settings:

Kay makes use of a good deal of Jewish history in some of these novels, especially The Lions of Al-Rassan (1995), which is based in 11th- and 12th-century Spain and focuses on the interaction among Jews, Muslims, and Christians. He cites the great historian [of medieval Egyptian Jewry] S.D. Goitein in his acknowledgments, and, in the course of the novel, he quotes poems from the corpus of medieval Hebrew verse.

One notices that, unlike historical Jews, Kay’s Kindath, [the Jewish-like religious group in the novel’s world], have no concept of a Zion from which they came and to which they might one day return (or even visit as pilgrims). . . . So, while Kay draws from many of the rich, diasporic aspects of Iberian Jewish culture, a figure such as Judah Halevi, the great Hebrew poet of medieval Spain who yearned for Zion, is not included. Tellingly, the center of Kindath culture is seemingly modeled on Ottoman Salonica, not Jerusalem.

[By contrast], his earlier novel Tigana (1990) is haunted by a Zionism that never becomes explicit. . . . The setting resembles fractious 16th-century Italy, though in this case one of the conquerors of the novel’s peninsula is a powerful sorcerer. In retaliation for the death of his son in battle against the rebellious republic of Tigana, this despot uses his magic not only to crush the population’s resistance but to eradicate its very name and memory. Only the survivors of the rebellion can recall their country. A spell prevents anyone else from believing that there ever was such a place as Tigana, which has been renamed after a rival state.

Does this not call to mind—despite its absence from Kay’s Afterword, [which notes several other historical events]—the Roman renaming of conquered Judea as “Palestine,” after the ancient Philistines? It may be going too far to suggest that Dianora, a woman from Tigana who winds up falling in love with her people’s enemy, has a name that sounds, appropriately, like the term for the dispersion of the Jews. But it does seem less than coincidental that the name of Devin Bar Garin, another of the Tiganans who awakens to his country’s erased history, recalls the first prime minister of Israel.

Much as the magic spell forces the people of Tigana to remain silent about their identity, [however], Kay remains silent about the concern with Jewish memory and identity that informs the thematic substratum of the novel.

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.