Their combined strength has increased but their leverage has weakened
Their combined strength has increased, but their leverage has weakened. Mr Barak could form a coalition without them.If they joined the government, it would be on his terms not theirs. The gravy days of Mr Netanyahu's fragile administration, where every vote was a matter of life or death - and the religious politicians were pastmasters at making each one count - are over.Their demands - lavish funding for seminaries, mass exemption from military service - provoked a resounding backlash among Israel's secular majority. Tommy Lapid, a journalist who entered politics only two months ago, won six seats on a stridently anti-clerical platform.The left-liberal Meretz, an older hammer of the ultra-Orthodox, held on to its nine seats.The seminarists are a particularly sore point.
About 30,000 of them are currently excused conscription at a time when Israel is waging a painful war of attrition with Hizbollah guerrillas in Lebanon One out of every 13 boys who reach military age is exempted The rate rose by 45 per cent during the Netanyahu years. Some 200,000 young, and not-so-young men study Talmud into middle age. The Israeli taxpayer foots the bill in grants, housing subsidies and family allowances.The secularists rejoiced this week that they were taking back their country. "We all feel better," beamed Yehuda Ilan in his furniture shop on the fringe of Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim ghetto. "Any free person would." They voted for Mr Barak not least because he promised to draft seminary students and redirect money to schools and universities.Yossi Beilin, one of his senior Labour colleagues, told The Independent yesterday: "The anti-religious swing was a reaction to the excesses of the last three years, rather than an expression of hatred towards Jewish tradition.
We aim to quell these flames, to bring peace at home as well as peace with our neighbours."Shaul Schiff, a columnist in the National Religious Party's Hatzofeh daily, urged his elected representatives to take up the offer. "We must respond to any call by Barak to join his coalition," he commented "The rift in the nation is frightening. Now is the moment of truth in which we have to stop the deterioration."Menachem Porush, 83, an ultra-Orthodox veteran who has negotiated with secular politicians since the first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was less submissive. "After the extreme anti-religious propaganda we went through in the elections, we are afraid," he said. "But if [Barak] wants to be sure of this term and further terms, he shouldn't make the mistake of breaking relations with the religious parties." Conscription, he said, was out.But Shmuel Sandler, a political science professor at Tel-Aviv's Bar-Ilan University, said the ultra-Orthodox would have to adapt to a new reality.. ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD Chan Sai-hung does not look like someone at the heart of Hong Kong's most serious constitutional crisis since it returned to Chinese rule almost two years ago.
But this schoolboy is one of the people the Hong Kong government says represents an "unbearable burden" on the community. The burden is so unbearable that yesterday it had a decision on immigration by Hong Kong's highest court overturned by the Standing Committee of China's National People's Congress (NPC), a body normally described as a "rubber-stamp parliament". Sai-hung was smuggled into Hong Kong from the Chinese mainland because his father was not prepared to risk indefinite separation from his son, who was born on the mainland but, when the British ruled Hong Kong, was only entitled to join his parents at the discretion of the Chinese authorities. This could mean waiting decades.In January the Court of Final Appeal ruled against the government in a test case. This established that under Hong Kong's new mini-constitution, called the Basic Law, everyone born to a Hong Kong resident had the right of abode, including Sai-hung. His parents took him to be registered at the immigration department but they found the authorities wanted to deport him.
"We felt cheated," his father said.He underestimated the extraordinary response of the authorities. China's most avid supporters in Hong Kong called for the court ruling to be overturned by a direct edict from Peking. This provoked an uproar about threats to the rule of law.Then in April the government declared that if the court ruling was to be implemented, some 1.67 million people would flood in from China. Officials claimed that living standards would plummet and taxpayers would be presented with a bill of pounds 5.7bn over a 10-year period.The propaganda campaign appears to have succeeded, as opinion polls show most people favour the court decision being overturned. However, the government's critics, which include most lawyers and all the political parties outside the pro-Peking camp, are alarmed about the consequences of the government's decision to ask the NPC to "reinterpret" the Basic Law so that no more than 200,000 people can enter Hong Kong under the right of abode.Yesterday, one day after announcing its decision, the government went to the legislature for endorsement of its decision - and received it.