Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey arrived in cinemas last week to a pre-sale frenzy that had not been seen since Oppenheimer. The $250 million spectacle delivers cyclopes, sirens and a Trojan Horse rendered in breathtaking analogue IMAX film. But strip away the monsters and the Bronze Age armour, and the film is doing something quieter and more dangerous. It is asking a question that reverberates well beyond the ancient Mediterranean: what happens to civilisation when the law of hospitality is broken, and what does it cost a people to come home?

Nolan’s moral architecture rests on what the film calls “Zeus’ Law.” The concept is drawn from the ancient Greek principle of xenia, the sacred obligation to treat the stranger as you would wish to be treated. Penelope warns her son Telemachus against violating it. Odysseus invokes it before entering the cave of the Cyclops. The faithful servant Eumaeus laments its collapse in his master’s palace. It is, as Nolan himself described it, the Golden Rule with theological teeth. The stranger at your door might be a god in disguise. Even if he is not, your survival depends on a world in which travellers can expect shelter and hosts can expect respect.

The film’s great revelation is that Odysseus himself shattered this covenant. The Trojan Horse was a perversion of xenia, a false gift that exploited sacred trust. And the punishment was not simply a decade lost at sea. It was contagion. The breaking of Zeus’ Law spread, in Odysseus’s own words, “like plague,” and the age of bronze collapsed around it. When the powerful violate the rules and walk unpunished, everyone follows. The mysterious “People from the Sea” who terrorise the film’s coastlines are not a single invading army. They are what happens when the social contract burns: roving bands, failed allegiances, coastal predation. Historians will recognise the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Strategists will recognise something closer to home.

For Israeli audiences, this is not ancient history dressed in sandals. It is a mirror held at an uncomfortable angle.

The parallel that has drawn the most commentary is the homecoming itself. Odysseus returns after twenty years to an Ithaca overrun by suitors who have consumed his provisions, courted his wife and declared him dead. They do not merely contest his throne. They contest his story. They insist that his journey was myth, that his kingdom has moved on, that the absent king has forfeited his claim by the simple fact of absence.

Jews know this script. The denial of historical connection to the land, the insistence that exile extinguished nationhood, the claim that the returning party is an interloper rather than a sovereign: all of this echoes through the suitors’ sneering dialogue as surely as it echoes through every international forum in which the foundational question remains who holds legitimate authority and on what basis. A Jerusalem Post columnist drew the comparison with admirable directness last week, noting that the suitors’ challenge to Odysseus mirrors the political challenge to Zionism itself. Tell a people they are dead long enough and perhaps the world will treat them accordingly.

But the film offers Israel a harder lesson than mere vindication. It is not enough, in Nolan’s telling, to come home. Odysseus must reckon with what he did to get there. The Trojan Horse won the war. It also poisoned the peace. The violation of xenia was strategically brilliant and morally catastrophic, and Odysseus spent a decade paying for a victory that could not be separated from its method. The film does not suggest that Troy should have been left standing, nor that the Greeks were wrong to fight. It insists that the manner of winning carries consequences that outlast the war itself, and that a civilisation founded on the Golden Rule cannot survive if its greatest hero is also its greatest transgressor.

That is the tension at the centre of Israel’s strategic position, not only this year but in every year since its founding. In Rome this month, Israeli and Lebanese negotiators concluded their sixth round of direct peace talks, the first such negotiations in over four decades, with the central question being how to construct zones in which a single legitimate authority replaces the patchwork of militias. It is Zeus’ Law translated into diplomatic language. The right of return is anchored by millennia of textual and archaeological evidence. But the conduct of the return, and of its defence, is measured against a principle older than Homer: are you treating the stranger as you would wish to be treated? When the answer is no, the contagion that Nolan dramatises is not fiction. It is the erosion of legitimacy that no amount of strategic brilliance can restore.

The film’s most striking image is not the Trojan Horse or the blinding of the Cyclops. It is Odysseus arriving at last on the shores of Ithaca and failing to recognise it. Twenty years of war and wandering have changed him so profoundly that home itself has become foreign. He must be told where he is. He must learn again how to inhabit the place he fought so hard to reach.

There is a version of Israel in that scene. A state that has spent its entire modern existence fighting to secure its presence in a land to which its claim is ancient and legitimate, only to discover that the act of securing can become its own form of estrangement. The suitors must be dealt with. The palace must be reclaimed. But the room, once emptied of pretenders, still has to be lived in. And Zeus’ Law, the obligation to treat the stranger as you would be treated, is the only furniture that matters.