Keyword + Microsyllabus: Zionism = Death

Editorial Collective

On the 50th anniversary of UN Resolution 3379, which declared Zionism a form of racism, the Editorial Collective of the Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism proposes the neologism “Zionism = Death” as a keyword for Critical Zionism Studies. This neologism has a twofold inspiration: the “Zionism = Racism” popular sloganization of the 1975 UN resolution, on the one hand,  and its redeployment in the now-iconic 1987 guerilla street art poster “Silence = Death,” on the other.¹ These equivalences and their reiterations identify and expose the politics of normalization vs. queer abjection. Which people are considered people(s)? Whose mass extermination counts as a genocide? Whose homicidal actions are recognized as intentional and whose are permitted to evade accountability? Which silences kill? Perhaps most importantly, how can exposing these hypocrisies of both silence and death generate a resistant aesthetics and praxis?

Frequently credited to the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), “a diverse, nonpartisan group of individuals, united in anger, and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis,” the famous Silence = Death poster emerged from what became retroactively known as the Silence = Death Project, a collective of gay men in New York City who began meeting in the early 1980s for support and solidarity in the face of the emerging AIDS crisis.² As member Avram Finkelstein observes, no one seemed to be talking about the fact that thousands of people, young gay men in particular, gay men in their twenties and thirties, were dying of AIDS every day throughout New York City.³ Those with the power to stop the disease refused to acknowledge it, even as they knew quite well what was happening. AIDS seemed as unspeakable as homosexuality itself, and these imbricated silences were no accident. The equivalence Silence = Death succinctly argued that these silences facilitated gay men’s deaths from the disease.

The Silence = Death poster exemplifies ACT UP’s eventual signature style: militant political critique communicated via sleek graphic design and pithy, easy-to-understand messaging. In his telling of how the poster design was developed and finalized by the group, Finkelstein notes the collective’s deliberate choice of the upward-pointing pink triangle. Searching for a pictograph that might hail the entirety of the queer community (which ultimately proved impossible), the collective settled on the pink triangle because of its allusions to Nazi Germany. While the Nazis forced the Jews corralled into death camps to wear six-pointed yellow stars, they required homosexual men and trans women to wear a pink triangle pointing down, marking them as sexual deviants. The collective’s inversion of the Nazi symbol became a mark of defiance, resistance, and queer pride. Making it a hot pink upright triangle, according to Finkelstein, was consistent with the poster’s “aggressive tone” and, we argue, asserted a distinctively queer defiance.

While the poster’s pink triangle drew attention to the queer victims of German Nazism, a silenced aspect of that otherwise well-known genocide, it also invoked the specter of genocide in the context of AIDS. Its creators were well aware of this allusion—half of its members were Jewish—and debated it endlessly, although not in the ways we might think. Convinced that the AIDS epidemic was an existential threat to gay life, the collective did not worry about drawing false moral equivalences between AIDS and Nazism. Rather, they were concerned that alluding too explicitly to the Nazi holocaust—and the branding of queers within it—would cast queer people as helpless victims and hasten the implementation of proposed anti-AIDS, anti-gay measures current at the time, such as quarantine, segregation, internment camps, and tattooing infected people.

Ultimately, the Silence = Death collective designed a political poster and slogan that accomplished an enormous amount of rhetorical and political work in just a few characters. First, it interpellated queer people as a people. Second, while it hailed queer people precisely through the prism of extermination, it was not to consign them to that death sentence, but rather to galvanize them to end the silences that facilitated it. The imperative of the poster might be stated more explicitly as “Speak/act as though your life depends on it!” The poster is a call to action that, like a manifesto, imagines into being the community who will respond.⁴ Through action, that community would become not simply queer people threatened with annihilation due to their queerness, but also a militant movement committed to survival in the face of a vicious homophobic state and public that manufactured and accelerated queer death. By refusing silence, the poster countered the virulent, pervasive homophobia at the time that rendered AIDS, homosexuality, and queer sex unspeakable. In so doing, it also forged a distinctly militant queer politics of anti-genocide.

On January 22, 2024, ACT UP NY officially endorsed the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel and called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. It tied both actions to their political commitments to housing, healthcare, and food security for all and referenced defining ACT UP protests against the 1991 Gulf War as precedent for such statements. 

At the same time, ACT UP NY also issued a design update of the original Silence = Death poster, turning the upright pink triangle into a watermelon slice to symbolize Palestine. Branded on t-shirts and hats, ACT UP continues to sell these items to raise funds for Gaza (the t-shirts also have a URL to ACT UP NY’s BDS webpage printed subtly underneath the graphic and slogan). 

Not simply a clever design innovation, the merging of the queer(ed) pink triangle with a symbol of Palestinian resistance to Zionism is a political statement. It makes a complex declaration of solidarity and defies the Western imperative of silence regarding the Gaza genocide. During the AIDS crisis, ACT UP theorized silence as complicity, while pointing out how silence also obscured politicians’ and policymakers’ inaction in the face of a deadly epidemic. Silence = Death posits silence as an intentionally homicidal and genocidal policy. By adapting this graphic to reference Palestine, ACT UP queers anti-genocide resistance, declaring solidarity with those marked for extermination. It names the crime that the powers-that-be dare not speak; namely, Israel is perpetrating a genocide in Gaza. It indicts those powerholders as not simply silent, but egregiously culpable. In an era when the legal determination of genocide turns fundamentally on identifying the killers’ intent, ACT UP’s Palestine solidarity Silence = Death graphic makes clear that even the absence of speech makes a statement.⁵ Since silence kills as well as provides cover for the killers, speaking out is essential for survival.

Deploying the Silence = Death image to speak out against the genocide in Palestine showcases continuities between the stultifying silences about queer mass death that once accompanied the AIDS crisis, and the ongoing silences that accompany Zionism and its critical study. Critically interrogating Zionism entails navigating taboo, official and unofficial censorship, surveillance, threats, punishment, and, perhaps most destructively, pervasive apathy that becomes consent. Over the last two years, moves to label Israel’s war on Gaza a genocide—much less protest against it—have been repeatedly thwarted, dismissed, ridiculed, demonized, punished, and declared antisemitic. These effectively are silencings, and they obscure what Silence = Death seeks to illuminate: the perpetrator. Zionism = Death names the source of this genocide, declaring Zionism to be the enemy. Zionism is the force of extermination in Palestine, not simply in this latest, historic genocide, but since its imperial implantation and expansion across the region. 

The term “genocide” emerged from the wreckage of World War II and the founding of international institutions and legal instruments intended to prevent future atrocities. Yet, exceptionalizing the Nazi holocaust within the legal and public understanding of genocide enshrined a restrictive definition that fetishizes intent and effectively rules out virtually every act of modern statecraft we might otherwise classify as genocidal.⁶ It ignores the essentially genocidal character of the nation-state formation itself, as well as hinders recognition of genocides that unfold differently than the Nazi holocaust. This silencing reminds us that the international postwar global order maintains its own existence and power via silencings, and by excluding itself and its actions from anti-genocidal scrutiny.

Zionism further mobilizes the exceptionality of the Nazi holocaust by transforming it into a paranoid, self-serving mythology of a Jewish people perennially threatened by an eternal, global, annihilatory antisemitism. This mythology has been useful for naturalizing the racial nation-state, justifying the colonization of Palestine, and inoculating the Israeli state from critical scrutiny. With its upward-pointing hot pink triangle, the JCSZ Editorial Collective proposes that Zionism = Death because Zionism = Genocide, because Zionism is a manufactured 19th-century white nationalist, settler colonial movement that exacts its survival at the expense of those it displaces in Palestine, supposedly to reclaim a “native” “homeland.” If settler conquest is “a structure not an event,”⁷ if “the Nakba is ongoing,”⁸ then the Gaza genocide is the latest chapter of a genocidal structure of power called Zionism (not to mention the “nation-state” and “international law”) whose exercise necessarily equals death for those abjected or queered by its machinations.

The ACT UP Silence = Death image defied this abjection by turning the triangle upright, and, according to Finkelstein, it called for more than speaking out. “From its inception,” said Finkelstein, “[the image] was part of a campaign intended to propose violent resistance: I wanted to call for riots during the 1988 election year.”⁹ Political sociologist Deborah Gould notes that some ACT UP members contemplated taking up arms and acts of terrorism, which they considered a legitimate response to government inaction and decimation of their people.¹⁰ This calls to mind another triangle—red, downward-pointing, and referencing the red triangle in the Palestinian national flag—which became a widely-known symbol of Palestinian resistance to Zionism and genocide in this latest chapter of ongoing Nakba. Hamas has used it in videos of military operations to identify Israeli targets before it destroys them. 

We recognize that some experience discomfort at calls to violent resistance, yet we also recognize that such discomfort indexes another unwritten rule regarding what may and may not be spoken in regard to Zionism or anti-homophobic political action. Who writes these rules? Who makes and enforces them? And at what point do we collectively recognize the futility of speech (condemnations, etc.) when unaccompanied by a force that can physically hinder the brutal machination and deadliness of colonial power? 

Both Finkelstein and Gould note that rage was the overpowering, governing emotion fueling the fervor, intensity, and brilliance of ACT UP. Finkelstein confesses that the first meetings of the Silence = Death collective were comforting precisely because they were a place that acknowledged fury:

We draw upon this anger as instructive to our scholarship and movements for freedom, liberation, and a collective refusal that propels change. The fact of the matter is that Zionism = Racism, Silence = Death, and Zionism = Death. Each of these equations posits, as Finkelstein puts it, a “divide” between those targeted for death and those doing the targeting. To be the target of the “death” and “racism” side of this divide is to be unspeakable, unknowable, abject, deathly, queer. As important as it is to shatter deathly silences by speaking out against them, it may also fall to the abjected to shatter those silences materially, so that they may survive and overcome the annihilatory threat posed to them by Zionism, its silences, and its many, mortal silencings. This is the destructive, dissident power of the abject, and the ineliminable, inescapable reason why abjection is necessary not simply for oppression but, even more so, liberation.

Suggested/Further Reading

alQaws for Sexual & Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society. “Beyond Propaganda: Pinkwashing as Colonial Violence.” October 18, 2020. https://alqaws.org/articles/Beyond-Propaganda-Pinkwashing-as-Colonial-Violence?category_id=0 

Anania, Billy. “How Watermelon Became a Symbol of Palestinian Resistance.” Hyperallergic, July 29, 2021. https://hyperallergic.com/how-watermelon-became-a-symbol-of-palestinian-resistance/ 

Baconi, Tareq. Fire in Every Direction: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2025.

​​Baroud, Ramzy, and Romana Rubeo. “On Kuffiyehs and Watermelon-Revealing the Meaning of Palestinian Symbols.” CounterPunch, April 7, 2024. https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/04/02/on-kuffiyehs-and-watermelon-revealing-the-meaning-of-palestinian-symbols/   

Crimp, Douglas, ed. AIDS Demo/Graphics. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1990.

Crimp, Douglas. “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic.” October 43, 1987: 237–271.

Chaves, Alexandra. “How the Watermelon Became a Symbol of Palestinian Resistance.” The National, 2021. https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/how-the-watermelon-became-a-symbol-of-palestinian-resistance-1.1230806.  

Eid, Rabeea. “Tourism as a Colonial Practice: Pinkwashing and the Israeli Pride Parade.” Mada al-Carmel- Arab Center for Applied Social Research, June, 2023. https://mada-research.org/storage/PDF/Tourism%20as%20a%20Colonial%20Practice-%20Pinkwashing-RabeeaEid.pdf 

Hatoum, Nayrouz Abu, and Hadeel Assali. “Attending to the Fugitive: Resistance Videos from Gaza.” In Gaza on Screen, ed. Nadia Yaqub, 136–56. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023.

Isaac, Arielle. “Stealing the Voice of Authority: A Conversation with the Editors of the New York War Crimes.” The Baffler, April 17, 2024. https://thebaffler.com/latest/stealing-the-voice-of-authority-isack. 

“New Flags for Palestine.” In Subjective Atlas of Palestine, ed. Annelys de Vet, 144–151. Rotterdam, NL: 101 Publishers, 2007. 

Matar, Dina. “Re-centering Palestine and Palestinians in Poster Art.” In Producing Palestine: The Creative Production of Palestine Through Contemporary Media, eds. Dina Matar and Helga Tawil-Souri, 39–49. London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.

Mason, Kiki. “Manifesto Destiny: ‘I am Someone with AIDS and I Want to Live by Any Means Necessary.’” Poz, June-July, 1996. https://actupny.org/diva/CBnecessary.html.

Palestine Poster Project Archives, General Union of Palestinian Students poster, circa 1980. https://www.palestineposterproject.org/posters/zionism-racism-1 

Omar, Hussein. “Homo Zion: How Pinkwashing Erases Colonial History,” Parapraxis 4: “Security” (August 2024), https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/homo-zion.

Samudzi, Zoé. “‘We are Fighting Nazis’: Genocidal Fashionings of Gaza(ns) after 7 October,” Journal of Genocide Research, 2024: 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2305524

Wentzy, James. “…by any means necessary.” Vimeo, 2017 (1994). https://vimeo.com/200367945 

Writers Against the War on Gaza. “‘Having Meetings and Issuing Threats’: Avram Finkelstein Discusses the Crimes of The Times, ACT UP and How to Steal the Voice of Authority.” New York War Crimes. March 14, 2024. https://newyorkwarcrimes.com/having-meetings-and-issuing-threats 

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