WHEN Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, flies to Washington on Monday for a crucial meeting with President Clinton, he will be taking his wife Sarah and young sons Yair and Avner along with him.
This is somewhat irregular, but then, as most of the world probably knows by now, things have been rather traumatic in the Netanyahu household of late. Specifically, as Mr Netanyahu remarked during a convivial satellite interview with the US talk show host Larry King the other day, "we don't have a nanny".
"Nannygate" the story of the dramatic dismissal of the Netanyahus' au pair, for burning the children's soup and other intolerable acts has been making headlines here and around the globe all week. And even as Sarah Netanyahu granted a rare interview with one Hebrew tabloid that portrayed her as a loving and attentive mother, a competing newspaper was publishing further revelations of Mrs Netanyahu's strange behaviour, as recounted by another former au pair.
Confirming the claims made by the first dismissed au pair, a South African immigrant. Ms Tania Shaw, British born Ms Heidi Ben Yair said Mrs Netanyahu worked her from dawn to midnight, was obsessive about cleanliness and miserly about food and money.
While Ms Shaw held out for several months, Ms Ben Yair lasted just a week before finding a better job elsewhere "but it was a nightmare," she says.
She reveals that the elder Netanyahu toddler, Yair, was kept in his playpen for hours and forbidden to play on the floor that Mrs Netanyahu's obsession with cleanliness led to demands for entire rooms to be thoroughly cleaned at 11 p.m., and that were a bedspread to touch the floor it would have to be relaundered.
She was limited to one tomato a day and an egg every two days, screamed at by Sarah "for 20 minutes" for eating an extra tomato, and reduced once to snitching some of the children's pudding.
The prime minister's office had been recruited to back up Mrs Netanyahu's claims that Ms Shaw, was delusional, unstable and prone to telling falsehoods. Mrs Netanyahu repeated these assertions, allowing that she was "fussy" about cleanliness.
Mrs Netanyahu also vehemently denied reports that she has called her husband out of vital meetings to attend to kitchen plumbing, that she has tried to influence his political appointments, and that she is building up a personal staff including a make up artist at the taxpayer's expense.
Doing his best to laugh off the nanny affair, and bizarre, unsubstantiated suggestions in some newspapers here that he may have worked clandestinely for the US government when studying there in the 1970s, Mr Netanyahu might reflect that all the personal gossip has deflected attention away from the question of whether he intends to honour the previous government's commitment to withdraw most Israeli troops from Hebron.