Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the two senior ministers of his cabinet are out of the country, and it is not clear who is filling in for Netanyahu. Nana/Channel 10 reported Sunday morning that it asked the Prime Minister's office who would be filling in for Netanyahu and had received no answer.
Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman flew to Italy Sunday and will return to Israel Monday night. Defense Minister Ehud Barak flew to China.
MK Nachman Shai (Kadima) criticized the top trio's simultaneous wanderings. “There are certain rules regarding these things,” he explained. “It is unusual and wrong for the holders of the three major positions to be gone at the same time. But this seems to be a government that behaves according to different rules.”
Besides signing several treaties of economic cooperation with Italy, they will meet Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and other senior officials to discuss the Palestinian Authority’s threat to unilaterally declare statehood in September.
Netanyahu will ask Berlusconi not to support the PA move. Meanwhile, the PA itself may be trying to climb down from the diplomatic tree it scaled and avoid the declaration of statehood. U.S. President Barack Obama may have threatened he would cut funds to the PA if it went ahead with the move.