Triangle of Fire

Curator's note:

This poster is a deliberately provocative taunt. The three cities within the triangle, Tulkarm, Nablus and Jenin, are home to some of the most incandescently combative refugee camps in all of Palestine. 

The poster references the breathlessly panicked response of the Israeli and Zionist press to the emergence of the "Inverted Red Triangle" as a new Palestinian revolutionary icon and elevates it to the level of a premonition. The Triangle of Fire, featuring a coiled, ready-to-attack snake, is meant to strike fear in the hearts of any Israeli military personnel who enter the territory delineated by the triangle. Israel regularly conducts raids in the triangle however, Israeli soldiers already feel towards operations there in much the same way Wehrmacht troops felt towards being sent to "the Russian Front" during WW 2: even though the Werhmacht regularly inflicted higher casualties than it suffered itself German soldiers understood they would be confronting an aggressive, determined enemy that was not intimidated by the possibility of death. 

The Arabic caption bordering the frame of the poster is different from the English title. It reads: "Triangle of Fear" or "Triangle of Alarm". It is also worth mentioning that all three cities are Muslim and the camps therein are increasingly sympathetic to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

In these camps militants, such as the members of the newly emerged Lion’s Den group walk around openly armed with automatic machine guns and are heroicized by the populace, also openly. DJW