You have to have a key to play in the tiger cage. And if you're not Jewish, you can’t have a key. Though it looks like one, bars and chain-link and a padlock, this is not, strictly speaking, a cage at all. It is an enclosed playground for the toddlers and smaller children of the makeshift urban settlement which surrounds it.
And the beast in question is not in the cage, but in the tension that weights the faces of the settlers, their children, the Israeli police and border guards and riot officers who keep the Arab residents of the neighborhood at a distance.
And that weights the faces of Arab children who - under the strictly enforced and entirely arbitrary bylaws of this Jewish colony which marries ancient ritual, manifest destiny, and science fiction - cannot enter the cage to play.
There's a reason why Israel's New Left is being born in this neighborhood of the city's largely Palestinian eastern half. There's a reason why the two-state division may well be spurred by this place. There's a reason why the demonstrations only grow in strength and impact, week after week after week. The reason is the extremism and the delusional reasoning of the settlement enterprise here, a reductio ad absurdum so exquisite, so cryingly self-defeating, that the Palestinian national movement should have thought of it years ago.
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