Ofer Winter has said it as plainly as a politician can: if his party enters the Knesset, it will recommend Benjamin Netanyahu, and only Netanyahu, to form the next government. In a normal campaign, that would make him an asset. Instead, the prime minister has decided to sharpen Likud's campaign against him, with the aim of pushing his party below the electoral threshold and then encouraging him to quit the race.
The contradiction is only apparent. Netanyahu's problem with Winter was never about whom he says he will recommend. It is about arithmetic, loyalty, and the one line of attack Likud has no ready answer for.
Start with the arithmetic. The first poll after Winter launched Amcha Yisrael gave him six seats, dropped Religious Zionism below the threshold, and cut the Netanyahu bloc to 49. Since then the numbers have been all over the place. Some polls give him eight seats and others leave him out of the Knesset entirely, with Likud swinging between 19 and 26. For Netanyahu, both outcomes are bad. A strong Winter takes seats from Likud and may sink Bezalel Smotrich. A weak Winter takes tens of thousands of right-wing votes and throws them away.
This is the scenario Netanyahu has warned about for his entire career. In a video released just before Winter's launch, he reached back to 1992, when Yitzhak Shamir's Likud faced Yitzhak Rabin's Labor. The right lost that election in part because small parties on its flank fell short of the threshold and their votes were wasted. Netanyahu's message to voters now is the same lesson: do not waste a vote on small parties that could bring the left to power. Privately, the mood is reportedly darker. According to Kan News, he told associates, "We lost 10 seats; I don't know how to get them back." Likud dismissed the report as fake news.
Then there is loyalty. Netanyahu's bloc has held together for years because its members had nowhere else to go. Winter does. He is considered close to Avigdor Liberman, whose military secretary he once was, and he reportedly turned down a reserved slot on the Likud list before launching his own party. A senior figure in Netanyahu's circle told Kan that Winter is "the Silman of our side," a reference to the coalition whip whose defection brought down the Bennett government.
Likud's lawyers of language have noticed the gap in Winter's pledge. In a campaign meeting, Ze'ev Elkin pointed out that Winter promised to recommend Netanyahu to the president. He never said he would refuse to sit in a government led by someone else. If Winter wins eight seats and neither bloc can form a coalition, those seats become decisive, and a recommendation is not a commitment.
The third problem is the hardest. Winter attacks Netanyahu from the right, and from inside the uniform. He is a kippa-wearing former Givati Brigade commander with a combat record that few in politics can match. When he says, as he did on Channel 12, that Netanyahu "is in a conception," he is using the vocabulary of October 7 against the man who was prime minister that day. He has gone after the Qatari cash that flowed into Gaza and the handling of the Haredi draft law. None of this can be waved away as the talk of the anti-Netanyahu protest camp, though some have tried. Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi told colleagues that Winter is the hope of Kaplan. It is a hard label to pin on a man whom Yair Netanyahu was promoting for defense minister just two years ago.
That is why Likud itself is split. Some in the campaign want to hit Winter now, while others warn that attacking him will only help him. Winter has already turned the pressure into a talking point. He claims private investigators and abusive messages were sent to members of his party, which Likud calls a complete lie, and he told i24NEWS that Netanyahu is trying to wipe out his party.
Netanyahu's bet is that right-wing voters, faced with a close race against Gadi Eisenkot, will decide a protest vote is a luxury they cannot afford. It has worked for him before. The risk is that this time, the voters he is trying to scare home are the ones Winter was built for: Israelis who are firmly on the right, served through the war, and no longer believe the leadership of October 6 should be the leadership of the day after.
