Analysis: Netanyahu's All-Out Campaign to Sideline Ofer Winter Only Makes the Case for Him Stronger

With Israel's election just two days away, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent an extraordinary share of his campaign's final stretch not on making his own case to voters, but on trying to push one small right-wing rival, retired general Ofer Winter, off the ballot entirely. That alone should tell voters something.

Over the past week, Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich met privately with Winter's own rabbi to lobby him to quit the race. When that failed, Smotrich offered to hand over one of his own party's allotted cabinet seats if Winter would simply step aside. Netanyahu personally circulated an open letter from bereaved military families urging Winter to withdraw, arguing that "every vote is important." None of it worked: Winter, while conceding that his early pledge of support for Netanyahu "may not have been right," has stayed in the race and stayed squarely on the right.

It's worth asking why a sitting prime minister would burn so much time and political capital trying to eliminate a single small party rather than simply out-campaigning it. The honest answer is that Winter represents exactly what a chunk of the right-wing electorate is looking for and Netanyahu currently can't offer: a candidate with real command experience and no decades of coalition compromises attached to his name, running on enforcement of equal national service and a real accounting for October 7 rather than more negotiated carve-outs. A confident front-runner doesn't need to buy his rivals off the ballot. He only resorts to that when he's worried the comparison won't go his way.

Coming at the same time Netanyahu is fending off accusations from Itamar Ben Gvir that he's quietly promised European officials to exclude Otzma Yehudit from the next coalition, the pattern is hard to miss: whatever Netanyahu tells right-wing voters in public, his private maneuvering in this campaign's final days has been about managing which of his own flank's candidates actually get a seat at the table. Voters who want a government built on what a candidate has actually done, not on backroom deals cut in the campaign's last week, have good reason to look at Ofer Winter and stay there.