Controversial former IDF general Ofer Winter on Tuesday launched a new right-wing party called the “Amcha Yisrael,” or “People of Israel,” vowing to pursue a hawkish security policy while also working to engender unity across Israel’s diverse citizenry.

His announcement sparked immediate pushback from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned that the emergence of several small nationalist parties would split the vote and harm the entire camp.

Addressing a room packed with some 300 supporters in Jerusalem at the party launch, Winter, nevertheless, argued that in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, a new party was necessary because veteran politicians had brought disaster upon the country.

“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,” he said, promising to “do everything to establish as broad a right-wing government as possible, with as many Zionist partners as possible.”

Winter called the upcoming October 27 election a “referendum on whether we are capable of handling the real challenges of the State of Israel — integrating the Haredim [ultra-Orthodox] into the IDF, connecting Arabs who want the good of the country, bringing about a significant change in the justice system, and dismantling protection rackets and wild crime stretching from the Negev to the Galilee,” a reference to the wave of violent crime in Arab communities.

Winter, like much of the Israeli political spectrum, argued that there can never be a Palestinian state. But echoing voices on the hardline right, he added that the only solution to the situation in Gaza is Palestinian “emigration,” declaring that “an enemy who starts a war against us will pay a heavy territorial price.”

“This is the true morality. This and no other. And for this I promise that we will fight with determination,” he asserted.

Calling for “less politics, more leadership,” Winter said that as a senior IDF officer, he “saw how distorted concepts cause an entire system to dismiss alternative thinking” — alleging that Israel’s leadership “ignores threats — even when they are right here, across the fence, when with........

© The Times of Israel