WHEN Benjamin in Netanyahu mounted his successful campaign for the Israeli prime ministership earlier this summer, he deliberately invited comparisons with President Clinton.
He portrayed himself as a similarly charismatic, new generation politician, even issuing his campaign speeches from a studio constructed to look like the Oval Office.
He also invited the camera crews, Clinton style, to focus on his family, wife Sarah and their two young sons, Yair and Avner. True, Sarah was his third wife, and he had admitted, on, TV, infidelity to her. But now the impression he clearly wanted to convey was one of domestic bliss chez Netanyahu.
Now, though, that idyllic picture has been shattered by the family's former au pair. A South African born immigrant, she was dismissed curtly by Mrs Netanyahu on Sunday literally thrown out on to the street sensibly for the unpardonable crime of burning the toddlers' soup.
Embittered by six months working under the apparently tyrannical rule of the third Mrs Netanyahu (a former air stewardess and now a child psychologist), the 21 year old au pair, Ms Tanya Shaw, has been spilling the beans. And the portrait that is emerging of Sarah is one that makes Mrs Clinton appear positively saintly.
Doing his best to undermine Ms Shaw's credibility, Mr Netanyahu has had his spokes people energetically circulating the allegation that the ex-au pair is "unstable", and had to be dismissed, on the orders of the prime ministerial bodyguards, because she constituted a security hazard.
But her father, Hebrew teacher, relatives and friends are all testifying to her basically sweet nature, and a look at the young woman herself in television interviews suggests a naive and trusting personality rather than a deranged one. The Hebrew tabloids have called the affair Nannygate and it looks set to run and run.
By her accounts, Ms Shaw had a thoroughly awful time at the Netanyahu home. The children, she insists, were delightful and loved her dearly. The father was sweet and, naturally, rarely around.
But the mother worked her day and night, screamed at her when she popped out of the home to phone her parents, wouldn't let her father visit her at the house, insisted she eat separately and buy all her own food, and, ironically, wouldn't even give her time off to vote on election day.
Though keen to promote her image as doting mother, Sarah Netanyahu, says Ms Shaw, rarely tucked the boys in at night, showing attentiveness only when press photographers appeared.
Young Yair and Avner sound like they lead a fairly miserable existence, too, forbidden by their mother to play on the floor (too dirty) and condemned to long hours sitting on a couch watching television.
Nobody not even Daddy Prime Minister is allowed to touch them without first washing his hands. Ms Shaw was required to wash her hands before touching their clothes, food and bottles as well.
On one occasion, she says, Mr Netanyahu was kept waiting outside the front door of the family's Jerusalem home, haplessly ringing the doorbell, while Sarah screamed at Ms Shaw to find a new pair of pyjamas for Avner, whose pyjama bottoms had, terribly, come into contact with the floor.
Summoning a security guard to turf her out, Mrs Netanyahu allegedly called Ms Shaw "a murderer" and refused initially even to let her collect her belongings.
As her father, Mr Phillip Shaw, put it yesterday, "I come from South Africa, and we had a black servant in the house. There is no way that I would ever have treated her the way Sarah Netanyahu treated my daughter."