They promised us at the beginning of the Gaza War these were the elections of the victory generation. That all 120 would go home. The elections came, and instead of new politics, we got, at most, politics “as good as new”. Eisenkot and Golan have already served as MKs; Bennett and Lapid, certainly. Erdan and Edelstein likewise, and so did Trooper and Hendel. And now, just this week, amid the last changes before the lists close, a brand-new party has shown up fresh out of the box, with a leader who wasn’t in politics in the years before the massacre.
This is what Ofer Winter is building on. On that large group in the public that wants the right’s positions but not the right’s leadership. His analysis is that they don’t care whether Winter goes with Netanyahu, as long as there’s a change inside Netanyahu’s coalition. He can break as far right as he likes on the issues, with no fear of losing votes.
Winter’s problem is two right-wing traumas from the past, one old and one new: Geula Cohen and Naftali Bennett. Geula Choehn’s Tehiya Party in 1992 burned votes on the right, and instead of the election ending in a 60-60 tie, Rabin won the 61st seat, on whose edge the Oslo Accords were reached and the streets of Israel filled with suicide bombers. Bennett, like Winter now, refused to fully commit to sitting with Netanyahu, and ended up defecting to the other side and bringing down right-wing rule.
If Winter wants to reach the elections safely he’ll need to build momentum very fast, and if he doesn’t want to lose votes on the right he’ll need to commit quickly to sitting only with Netanyahu. The problem is that there’s a certain contradiction between the two moves, because to win back votes that have already crossed the lines, a declaration of loyalty to Netanyahu is not necessarily what will do the trick.
For the interested party himself, it certainly won’t help. Natan Eshel, a netnayhu confidant—a Jew no longer young, whose entire reason for being is the pouring of poison and rumors of betrayal—convinced the prime minister that Winter has it sewn up with Liberman. Circumstantial evidence joined the suspicion: Winter turned down an explicit offer of a guaranteed slot on the Likud list. The reason, of course, is that he sees himself as prime minister at the very least. Netanyahu can see Winter as a promise; right now, contrary to the view of some of his advisers, he sees him as a clear and present danger.
What will Netanyahu do if, a week from now, it turns out Smotrich isn’t crossing the threshold and Winter is? A merger between Likud and Religious Zionism is being weighed, for all its heavy costs, but the fear there is that it would only give Winter a boost. A technical bloc between Smotrich and Ben Gvir is off the table, given the mutual loathing between the two. And there’s a third option: running all the way, on two separate tickets, on a wholly open front. That ended in tears for Netanyahu in 2019, and the same way for his rivals in 2022. What are the odds it ends differently this time?
