*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered directly to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

Between the multi-state reinforcement of apartheid and the ramifications of its applied realpolitik, the genocide of Palestinians unequivocally deserves political foregrounding. Realising an end to the genocide and a beginning to official accountability requires us to move through single-issue thinking, let alone alterity, and into a politics of complex care and consistent respect. As a queer theorist and researcher, one way I understand this politics of plurality and connectivity, or a queer politics, is the honouring of life as it is expressed by any identity. This article draws from the ever-growing corpus that contextualises the ethical obligation behind “Queers for Palestine” despite additional top-down and normative constraints. My goal, however, is to show how misusing assertions of proportionality at the expense of the trans community (and a queer politics) affects Palestinian liberation. If proportionality at its core is a harmony of multiples, it is crucial to consider how further disrespecting one side of a promising coalition destabilises the other.  

Foundational to contemporary international humanitarian law (IHL) is the concept of proportionality, which proscribes undue injury to non-combatants during conflict. Principally, if the anticipated civilian injury exceeds the anticipated martial advantage of the attack, the attack must not be made. The active genocide against Palestinians has become one of the most extensively reported violations of the principle of proportionality. Although the Israeli government has left unratified the Geneva Convention’s first and second protocols expounding the proportionality principle, proportionality—even in its most tacit form—is as much an aspect of customary law as it is an intuitive social obligation in philosophy and psychology. Seemingly only a modicum of empathy would be necessary to recognise that Israel’s brutality does not just contradict the socioethical precedent but actively pulverises proportionality through an international network of actors willing to more broadly distort it.

For me, there is a reason why Zionist assertions of anti-Semitism as justification for genocide sound homophonic to the claims that denying trans people legal, medical, presentational, and linguistic access to their gender will somehow protect cis-women and children. These pretences of proportionality play in the same time signature of the ontological colonialism that rhythmises violent........

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