Brig. Gen. (res.) Ofer Winter seemingly left the launch event for his new political party, People of Israel, far more fired up than when he arrived.

I caught Winter on his way out for a brief conversation. Outside the venue, prominent Likud field activist Rami Ben-Yehuda could be heard loudly vilifying the former IDF commander through a megaphone he had brought from home.

Ben-Yehuda frequently acts as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political hatchet man. Netanyahu himself recently released a video elaborating on how Winter’s voters would essentially be throwing their ballot slips in the trash.

Meanwhile, Natan Eshel – Netanyahu’s disgraced former chief of staff, who remains his most trusted back-channel fixer and mouthpiece – has been relentlessly sending out messages declaring that Winter is a “false messiah” doing MK Avigdor Liberman’s bidding, and therefore poses a grave danger to the right-wing bloc.

“You have to be an idiot not to understand that Winter will join the left-wing bloc,” Eshel wrote. “Apparently, he bears a grudge against Netanyahu because he wasn’t promoted to major general and wasn’t appointed his military secretary. He was former defense minister Liberman’s military secretary and is still aligned with him.”

Winter hears this rhetoric, and it only fuels his motivation. “People shoot at me all the time, including in far more dangerous places,” he told The Times of Israel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses voting for new and small right-wing parties in a video posted on his official Telegram account on August 24, 2026 (Video in Hebrew, with English subtitles added by ToI)

Asked whether he intends to go all the way to the election, even if he risks falling below the electoral threshold, Winter was unequivocal. “When I attack, I attack,” he replied, immediately adding of his own volition: “If they had let me finish Gaza, I would have finished Gaza.”

In other words, Winter is not folding. Anyone who attended Tuesday’s gathering at Jerusalem’s Shalva National Center understood that he did not launch this venture in order to retreat. This was a genuine election campaign kickoff – a stark contrast to the somewhat sterile political launches recently held by figures like Yoaz Hendel, Chili Tropper, Gilad Erdan and Yuli Edelstein.

Winter spent at least a year meticulously planning the rollout, missing absolutely nothing. The event ran with strict military discipline: the new party’s candidates were carefully curated, its hard-right message was delivered without flinching, the staging and multimedia were highly polished, and the packed crowd eagerly embraced the People of Israel campaign.

The underlying message was clear: Here is a fresh party entirely untainted by the catastrophic failures of the October 7 Hamas massacre, offering a new, high-quality and untraditional leadership bearing a promise of change and absolute victory. We have not seen anything quite like it in this election cycle.

Winter himself sharpens this message and apologizes for absolutely nothing. Quite the opposite. He seems to have waited years for this precise moment to settle accounts with the military superior who refused to promote him – former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot – and the one who........

© The Times of Israel