Recently the peer-reviewed geography journal Antipode published an article by Wassim Ghantous, “Homological Correspondence: Israel as a Frontier of Global Domination.”
The prose follows a familiar contemporary academic pattern: dense terminology that substitutes conceptual layering for empirical constraint. For example:
The positioning of Israel as the frontier of the homological space denotes distinct spatiotemporal articulations… the frontier is a space of indistinction, intermixing, hybridity, and confusion… an unruly elastic force field of diffusion, expansion, and intensification…
This language matters less for its obscurity than for its function: it allows the argument to operate through metaphorical coherence rather than testable claims. The paper’s thesis is not built by adjudicating competing explanations but by embedding Israel into a totalizing interpretive model in which it necessarily becomes the generator of global violence.
A key example concerns the laws of armed conflict:
Israel plays an entrepreneurial role in pushing the limits of global frameworks regarding the rules of war… Israeli practices become normalized and emulated internationally.
There is a kernel of truth here. Israel does appear frequently in military legal scholarship discussing difficult operational dilemmas. But the paper reverses causality.
International humanitarian law — from the UN Charter through the Geneva Conventions — was constructed around implicit structural assumptions:
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states monopolize organized violence
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governments control armed forces
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war has a beginning and an end
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battlefields can be separated from civilians
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armed groups protect their own population
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front lines exist
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non-state actors are peripheral
Modern non-state armed groups deliberately violate these assumptions. Organizations such as Hamas or Al-Qaeda embed military assets within civilian environments precisely to exploit the legal framework governing state militaries.
Israel therefore encounters edge-cases first not because it seeks to erode law, but because it is repeatedly placed in situations the law’s original model did not contemplate. Military legal literature studies Israel for the same reason aviation investigates rare accidents: it is where the framework is stress-tested.
Customary international law then evolves in response to these stress cases.
The direction is thus:
assumption-breaking warfare → legal adaptation → international diffusion
The article asserts the reverse:
Israeli deviation → global normalization of violence
The difference is methodological. One treats legal development as reactive adaptation to new forms of conflict. The other treats it as ideological export.
The paper signals its underlying framework in subtler ways as well. It presents accusations such as “genocide” as settled premises rather than argued conclusions, and it refers to the holocaust in lowercase — notably diverging from the journal’s own historical usage. That typographical choice is not trivial; it collapses a specific historical event into a general category of violence, which is necessary for the article’s broader comparative structure to function.
In other words, the argument depends on a prior assumption: Israel must already occupy the position of paradigmatic global harm. Once that assumption is installed, examples across law, policing, and technology can be narratively aligned to reinforce it.
Remove that assumption, and the explanatory structure no longer uniquely selects Israel; it instead describes a general pattern of legal systems adapting to new forms of warfare.
The paper therefore does not primarily present empirical findings. It presents a coherent interpretive schema — one whose stability depends less on evidence than on preserving its initial premise.
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