In the wake of Princess Diana's death, Israel's media-hounded first family, the Netanyahus, have been asking their country's media snappers to show greater restraint.
Yesterday, the first day of the new school year, the Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a radio plea to photographers to stay away from the Jerusalem school where his son, Yair (6), was enrolling.
"I would suggest you leave your cameras at home," the prime minister said in a radio interview. "I would like this boy to be given the opportunity to grow up like any regular child."
Mr Netanyahu's plea fell on deaf ears - a small pack of TV crews and photographers did stake out the school. It is not the first time that his calls to the media to keep his children out of the spotlight have been ignored. Yair has even featured as a puppet in Hahartsufim, the Israeli version of Spitting Image.
As with sections of the British media, which have sometimes defended their intensive scrutiny of Diana by asserting that the relationship worked both ways, Israeli journalists claim Mr Netanyahu has invited unprecedented media coverage of his family by thrusting them into the foreground.
He unexpectedly invited his wife, Sara, to share the applause by his side at his main election victory celebration last year, takes her and their two sons on many diplomatic trips abroad, and earlier this year had the boys photographed at play in the Oval Office under the benevolent supervision of President Clinton.
But the tactic has backfired, and Mrs Netanyahu, in particular, has become a persistent target of critical coverage and has reciprocated with a stream of counter-attacks, obsessing in a recent TV interview over the perceived media bias against her husband.
Paying tribute to Princess Diana, Mrs Netanyahu observed pointedly to one journalist, "The media needs to know that famous people also have private moments," and told another, "To my sorrow, everyone can now see what they (the paparazzi) are capable of."
David Horovitz is managing editor of the Jerusalem Report