By law, all these residences are kept by the state. The public purse pays all living expenses, such as food and drinks, as well as the staff that mans (and womans) them.
Since the beginning of the Netanyahu terms, news and rumors about the goings-on in the three residences abound. It seems that Sarah Netanyahu, the would-be-queen, is a difficult person to deal with, especially for domestic employees. Several of them have sued her in court for mistreatment. Human turnover is frequent. Dismissed personnel complain.
One disclosure was that Sarah'le (as everybody calls her, not always out of love) has removed garden furniture from the government-owned residence to her private villa. Another was that the chief of the domestic staff was woken in the middle of the night at his home and ordered to bring some hot soup at once to his mistress' bedroom. It seems that she frequently yells at the staff for small omissions. All this was brought up in various court cases, to the great delight of the masses.
For example, it became public that the Prime Minister's residence has ordered ice cream for hundreds of thousands of dollars during the year. Always pistachio.
Complaints about the Prime Minister's love for luxury are not new. For years now, the Attorney General has been making inquiries about "Bibitours," the habit of Netanyahu and his family to fly first-class and stay in luxury hotels all over the world without paying a shekel -- all expenses paid by foreign billionaires. Since he was Minister of Finance at the time, this was against the law.
And now come the bottles.
ONE DISMISSED employee disclosed to the media that Sarah'le habitually sends two government employees in an official car to the bottle collection station to return empty bottles and get the deposits back. Instead of returning the money to the government, as the law demands, she pockets it for her private use.
Big deal? Seems so. When first caught, the family returned to the government 4,000 shekels, almost a thousand Euros. Now it appears that the sums are much larger, and that Sarah'le has continued with the practice since.
This may be a criminal offence. The Attorney General and the State Comptroller, both Netanyahu appointees, threw the file at each other. Now the may be compelled to do something before the elections.
How many bottles? It has become known that the family consumes an average of one bottle of expensive wine every day. In a country like Israel where many people don't drink alcohol at all, that is quite a lot. When asked about it, the family lawyer astonished the country by asserting on TV that "wine is not alcohol."
The idea that our Prime Minister may be drunk when fateful decisions have to be taken at once -- ordering a military action, for example -- is not very appealing.
A YIDDISH expression comes to my twisted mind. Long before Alois Alzheimer, the German doctor, discovered 100 years ago the disease that bears his name, the symptoms described by him were called in Yiddish "over bottle." This is derived from the Hebrew "over battel" -- nothing-doer, useless old fogey.
About the Netanyahus one could say now, in a more literal sense, that they are over-bottled.
FOR WEEKS now, this is the hottest topic in Israel.
Bibi-haters, with which the country abounds, are happy. This will surely hurt Netanyahu and the Likud grievously. Does it?
As of now, not at all. On the contrary, after several days in which the "Zionist Camp" (a.k.a. Labor Party) overtook the Likud in the polls by one or two seats, the Likud has rebounded and taken the lead by two or three seats. No Labor djinn has emerged from the bottles.
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