Netanyahu’s Kith and Kin Are Latest to Kiss and Tell

During the spring’s national election campaign and ever since, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invited unprecedented media coverage of his family, especially his wife and two young sons.

Now, having whetted the appetite of Israel’s boisterous press, the telegenic, media-savvy Netanyahu may wish he could take it all back.

Relatives of previous Israeli leaders have stayed out of the limelight, rarely giving interviews or making public appearances. But Netanyahu quickly became known here for his U.S.-style campaign touches and relative openness to the media, allowing photographers to capture him holding hands with his wife and playing with his boys.

In more than five months in office, though, the prime minister has already suffered two short-lived family scandals, both jumped on by the tabloid press.

In the first, dubbed “Nannygate,” a dismissed baby sitter alleged that Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, was a harsh taskmaster with an unnatural obsession for cleanliness.

Then Sara Netanyahu was back in the news when her first husband said he planned to write an unflattering book about their six-year marriage. (He eventually shelved that idea, apparently under pressure from the leadership of his collective farm, which in turn was pressured by the prime minister’s office.)

Even before his election, Netanyahu’s political career had survived an acknowledged extramarital affair and accusations that he further humiliated his wife with his televised confession of infidelity.

“It was a soap opera even before he was prime minister,” said Ze’ev Chafets, a social commentator.

Now, as Netanyahu confronts the toughest challenge of his administration--how to satisfy both the Palestinians and right-wing members of his own government on an Israeli troop pullout from Hebron--he faces new problems close to home.

In successive, widely publicized interviews with Israeli newspapers, two brothers of Sara Netanyahu have attacked the prime minister’s policies on the disputed West Bank city--from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

The notion of an Israeli prime minister being walloped in the media by his own fractious family struck some political observers here as ironic: the nation’s first U.S.-style leader suffering a familiar, American-style embarrassment.

“It’s like Jimmy Carter,” chortled Ephraim Sidon, chief writer for a popular Israeli television satire that often skewers the prime minister and, lately, his family members. “It’s one thing after the other with all these relatives.”

Sara Netanyahu’s brother Hagai Ben Artzi, a religiously observant Jew who teaches Jewish philosophy at a college here, struck the first blow last month by vehemently attacking the prime minister’s stated intention to withdraw Israeli troops from Hebron, the last major city in the West Bank still under Israeli control.

It was, he told the daily newspaper Maariv, a betrayal of the voters and “a nefarious deed that has no rival.”

Hagai Ben Artzi took up residence among Jewish settlers the next day.

Then another brother-in-law chimed in, embarrassing Netanyahu from the left-wing perspective.

Matania Ben Artzi said Israel should get out of Hebron, and he even suggested that Israel give East Jerusalem to the Palestinians.

The brothers’ comments also earned them a one-time spot on Sidon’s popular Friday night satire.

The television show recently featured a group of puppets clearly meant to be the Ben Artzi family--all resembling Sara but some with beards and mustaches--pressing their demands on a hapless Netanyahu or threatening to go to the media.

Sara Netanyahu herself has earned a more regular, albeit indirect, mention on the show.

One of the satire’s most popular segments features the “cockroaches” in the Israeli first lady’s kitchen, wisecracking puppets who squabble over peace and security, the buzzwords of her husband’s campaign.

“We don’t want to insult” the Netanyahus, Sidon said, chuckling. “But they provide us with so many things to write about.”