Of all the numerous new political groupings to have emerged as the election campaign gathers pace, former general Ofer Winter’s People of Israel party, launched on Tuesday night, is the one that has Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu most worried.

The Likud leader routinely traduces his opponents as dangerous leftists, but that won’t work with Winter, who has for years been what might best be termed a conditional ally of Netanyahu’s. (The prime minister reportedly consulted with him in the early months of the post-October 7 war in Gaza.)

Although Yair Netanyahu indeed rushed to characterize him as a servant of the left, Winter is a religious rightist to his soul, who told the officers in the Givati Brigade he commanded that 2014’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza was a religious war against a “blasphemous” enemy, who adamantly opposes Palestinian statehood, and who unabashedly declared in Tuesday’s opening campaign speech that the only solution in Gaza is “emigration.”

Winter vowed in that speech to “do everything to establish as broad a right-wing government as possible, with as many Zionist partners as possible” — phrasing that echoed Netanyahu’s reiterated pledge this week to form a “broad national government,” and that might therefore be considered music to the prime minister’s ears.

Except Winter also declared, with very careful wording, that “anyone who thinks, after October 7, that the public will accept everything remaining the same in the political sphere, without new people entering the system, is making a bitter mistake.” That didn’t quite constitute the explicit demand opposition front-runner Gadi Eisenkot is making, for the resignation of anyone who held a “central role” at the time of the Hamas invasion, but it was no endorsement of Netanyahu’s continued prime ministership.

Winter is anything but tainted by October 7. In IDF limbo himself at the time, he dashed to the front from his home in the Galilee with his personal firearm and fought (Hebrew link) in the area of Kibbutz Be’eri. (The Knesset slate he announced on Tuesday includes Sigal Kraunik-Atia, the widow of Be’eri’s security coordinator Arik Kraunik, who was killed defending the kibbutz.)

He is a proven, outspoken advocate for integrating Haredim into the IDF; indeed, he was confronted and denounced as a traitor by ultra-Orthodox extremists this month as he left a conference he had addressed about special tracks for Haredi enlistment.

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© The Times of Israel