Daniel's been reading about a new party launch in Israel and sent us a whole stack of questions. Here's what he's asking. Who is Ofer Winter, the former IDF brigadier general everyone's suddenly talking about? What's the controversial background that made him a household name before he ever entered politics? What's this new party he just launched — Israel Hayim — and what does it actually stand for? How is he positioning himself against Netanyahu? And then there's the line Daniel pulled from Richly Code — that Winter is leading "the kind of right-wing party the left loves." What does that even mean?
We dug into the news on this one — Winter launched the party just this month, August twenty twenty-six — and the picture is stranger than the headline. He's a hardliner who might accidentally hand the left a government.
Which is the kind of contradiction we live for. So where do we start?
The man himself. Ofer Winter is a former IDF brigadier general. He commanded the Givati Brigade, which is one of the infantry brigades — the one with the purple berets — and later the 162nd Division. That's a serious combat command. He's not a desk general who spent his career at headquarters. He led from the front, and he has the reputation to match.
And he's religious. Openly, publicly religious in a military that has historically maintained a pretty secular ethos at the top.
Right. The IDF officer corps has always had religious soldiers and commanders, but the senior brass — the generals — have tended to be from the secular, kibbutz-origin, old Labor Zionist stock. Winter broke that pattern visibly. He's a religious Zionist, and he didn't try to downplay it in uniform. He brought religious language into operational orders.
That's the part that got people's attention. What kind of language?
During Operation Protective Edge in twenty fourteen, when he was commanding Givati in Gaza, he sent a letter to his troops that framed the operation in explicitly messianic terms. He wrote about fighting "the blasphemous enemy" and invoked divine protection. The letter leaked. It caused a firestorm.
Because it sounded less like a military order and more like a crusade.
That was the criticism, yes. The military establishment was uncomfortable. A secular general giving the same order would say "we're going into Gaza to destroy tunnel infrastructure." Winter said "we're going to war against an enemy that defames the God of Israel." Very different register.
And that's not even the biggest controversy.
No. The big one is twenty sixteen. Winter was the commander in the West Bank at the time. There was a car-ramming attack — a terrorist drove into a group of soldiers, and in the chaos, one female soldier was pulled into the attacker's vehicle and taken hostage. Winter invoked the Hannibal Directive.
Explain that for people who haven't followed Israeli military doctrine.
The Hannibal Directive is a standing order — it's been modified over the years — but the core idea is that you do whatever is necessary to prevent a soldier from being captured alive. Including opening fire on the vehicle carrying the hostage. The logic, brutal as it is, is that a captured soldier becomes an enormous strategic liability — look at Gilad Shalit, held for five years in Gaza, eventually exchanged for over a thousand prisoners. The directive says: stop the abduction, even at great cost.
And Winter applied it in a situation where firing on the vehicle meant risking the life of the soldier inside.
Yes. He ordered troops to shoot at the attackers' vehicle. The female soldier was still in it. The attackers were killed. The soldier — her name hasn't been widely published, but she was injured. She survived. The ethics of that order were debated for months. Winter's defenders said he made a split-second decision to prevent a hostage situation that could have dragged on for years. His critics said he was willing to kill an Israeli soldier to avoid a politically inconvenient kidnapping.
That's the kind of decision that defines a career. And it's the kind of thing that follows you into politics.
When Winter announced he was entering politics, the Hannibal Directive was the first thing a lot of people remembered. But here's the thing — for his target voters, it's not a liability. It's a credential. It says: this is a man who makes hard calls, who doesn't flinch, who puts the mission above sentiment.
So that's the man. Now let's talk about the party he just launched — and why it might actually matter.
Israel Hayim. "Israel Lives." Launched in August twenty twenty-six, positioning itself as a right-wing alternative to Likud. The platform is hardline on security: annexation of parts of the West Bank, no Palestinian state, expanded settlements, decisive military action against Hamas and Hezbollah. Standard right-wing fare.
But?
But it also emphasizes anti-corruption, judicial reform, and cost-of-living. Those are not standard right-wing issues — at least not the way he's framing them. Anti-corruption is usually a centrist or center-left talking point in Israel. Cost-of-living brought down the last government. Winter is saying: I'll give you the security you want from the right, but I won't steal from you while I do it.
And that's the direct shot at Netanyahu.
Explicitly. Winter is running as the "clean right." He's a combat veteran — Netanyahu avoided frontline service, did his time in a non-combat intelligence unit and then went straight into politics and business. Winter has no corruption allegations — Netanyahu is on trial in three cases. Winter has never been indicted, never been questioned under caution, never had his wife investigated for misusing state funds.
It's a resume designed to make Bibi look like exactly the problem Winter claims to be solving.
And the timing matters. August twenty twenty-six — elections are expected within months. The current coalition is fragile. Winter is trying to consolidate the anti-Netanyahu right before the race solidifies into a two-person contest between Netanyahu and whoever the center-left puts forward.
What's his critique of the war?
This is from his launch speech, reported in the Times of Israel. He said — and I'm quoting — "three years of war without a decisive result." He's talking about the Gaza and Lebanon fronts. The current government, he argues, has been fighting a war of attrition with no endgame. No victory, no diplomatic resolution, just permanent conflict management. Winter's pitch is: I know how to win wars, and I will actually win them.
Which is a pretty potent message when the country has been in and out of military operations for three years and nobody can tell you what the end state looks like.
And he's got polling to back up that people are listening. Jerusalem Post reported in August that early surveys show Israel Hayim pulling eight to twelve seats. That's not a fringe party. That's a real bloc.
Where are those seats coming from?
Mostly from Likud and Religious Zionism. Which makes sense — Winter's base is religious Zionist voters who are tired of Netanyahu's corruption and Likud's internal dysfunction, but who are not going to vote for the center-left under any circumstances. He's giving them a home.
So Winter is running as the clean right alternative to Bibi. But here's where it gets weird — and where Richly Code's quote comes in.
"The kind of right-wing party the left loves." Let's unpack that, because on the surface it makes no sense. Winter is everything the left opposes. He wants annexation. He opposes a Palestinian state. He uses messianic language. He invoked the Hannibal Directive. If you're a Meretz voter, Ofer Winter is your nightmare.
And yet.
And yet the electoral math turns him into your best friend. Here's how it works. The Israeli Knesset has a hundred twenty seats. You need sixty-one for a majority. The right-wing bloc — Likud, Religious Zionism, Shas, United Torah Judaism — has been hovering around sixty-two to sixty-five seats in recent elections. It's tight, but it's a majority.
Now introduce Winter.
Winter takes ten seats. Those ten seats come from Likud and Religious Zionism. So the right-wing bloc is still the same voters, but now they're split across more parties. Likud drops from, say, thirty-two to twenty-eight. Religious Zionism drops from twelve to eight. Winter has ten. Add Shas at nine, UTJ at seven. That's sixty-two.
Still a majority.
On paper. But here's the catch — Winter has said he will not sit in a Netanyahu-led coalition. He called it refusing to be "a fig leaf for a corrupt government." That's a direct quote, also from the Times of Israel. So if Winter refuses to join, those ten seats sit in the opposition even though they're right-wing seats. The math collapses. Netanyahu can't form a government.
And the center-left bloc, which might have fifty-five to sixty seats, suddenly has a path.
Winter doesn't have to endorse the left. He doesn't have to join a left-wing coalition. He just has to refuse to join Netanyahu. That alone could deny Bibi the majority and force either a unity government or new elections.
So the left loves him not for what he believes, but for what he does to their opponents.
It's a strategic appreciation, not an ideological one. Nobody on the left is going to vote for Israel Hayim. But they're going to watch Winter's poll numbers the way you watch a friend's divorce proceedings — hoping it works out well for them, even if they're not directly involved.
That's the Richly Code paradox in a sentence. He's too right-wing for the left on policy, but his political function is to split the right. The left loves him because he weakens Netanyahu.
And this creates some strange incentives. If Winter actually becomes a contender — if his polling hits twelve, thirteen, fourteen seats — the left might tacitly support him in the campaign. Not endorsing him. Nobody's going to stand at a podium and say "vote for the annexation guy." But they might not attack him either.
Because a stronger Winter means a weaker Netanyahu.
And a weaker Netanyahu means a path to power for the center-left. You can imagine the calculus. Yair Lapid's strategists are looking at Winter's numbers and thinking: don't touch him. Don't criticize him. Let him eat into Likud. Every seat Winter takes from Bibi is a seat we don't have to win.
Has this happened before?
Not exactly like this, but there are echoes. Avigdor Lieberman in twenty nineteen played a similar spoiler role. Lieberman is right-wing — he lives in a settlement, he's hawkish on security — but he refused to join a Netanyahu coalition after the April twenty nineteen election because he disagreed with Netanyahu's handling of the ultra-Orthodox draft issue. That refusal triggered a second election in September, and then a third in March twenty twenty. Lieberman's eight seats didn't join the left, but they denied Netanyahu a majority.
And Lieberman's party, Yisrael Beiteinu, is still around. It's been over two decades.
Right. The misconception is that splinter parties in Israel always fail. They don't. Lieberman has survived. Yesh Atid was a new party in twenty thirteen and is now the main opposition. But the difference is that Lieberman never tried to replace Likud — he carved out a niche as the Russian-speaking, secular right. Winter is trying to do something much harder: go directly at Likud's base.
That's the part that makes me skeptical. Likud is not just a party. It's a political machine that has dominated the Israeli right for nearly fifty years. It's survived splits before. It's survived challengers. It's survived Netanyahu's indictments.
And Netanyahu himself is a ferocious campaigner. He will not go quietly. The moment Winter looks like a real threat, Likud will deploy everything — the attack ads, the loyalty tests, the "don't split the right" messaging. They'll say a vote for Winter is a vote for Lapid.
Which, mathematically, it might be.
That's the irony. The attack ad writes itself, and it's not wrong. If Winter takes seats from Likud and refuses to join a Netanyahu coalition, the most likely outcome is a center-left government. So Likud will say: Winter is a left-wing Trojan horse. And they'll have a point.
Even though Winter's platform is to the right of Likud's.
Even though. The electoral math doesn't care about platform. It cares about coalition arithmetic. And the arithmetic says Winter helps the left.
There's a deeper knock-on effect here too. If Winter actually becomes a contender — if he's pulling twelve seats and he's the kingmaker — what does the left do? They can't form a government with him. His platform is annexation. Theirs is two states. Those are not compatible.
So you get a standoff. The left can't govern with Winter, and the right can't govern without him — but Winter won't sit with Netanyahu. You're looking at either a unity government where nobody gets what they want, or a fifth election in three years.
Which is where the "left loves him" thing hits its limit. They love him as a spoiler. They don't love him as a coalition partner. The moment he has real power, the affection evaporates.
And Winter knows this. He's not courting the left. He's not trying to be a centrist. His entire pitch is: I am the authentic right. I am what Likud used to be before it became a vehicle for one man's legal troubles. I am the right without the corruption.
Does he have a path to actually replace Likud, or is this a protest candidacy?
That's the question. Historically, the Israeli right has been a big tent with one real landlord — and that landlord is Netanyahu. Every challenger has either folded back into Likud or been marginalized. Naftali Bennett tried to be the clean right and ended up as prime minister for a year, then his party collapsed. Gideon Sa'ar tried to challenge Netanyahu from the right and ended up joining the coalition anyway.
So the structural problem is that the right-wing voter wants right-wing policies, and Likud delivers those. Winter is offering the same policies plus honesty. But voters might decide that policies plus corruption is still better than policies plus honesty if the honesty costs them the election.
Because the honest guy can't form a government. The corrupt guy can.
That's a grim summary of the last few election cycles.
It is. But Winter's timing might be different. Three years of war without a decisive result. A prime minister on trial. A coalition that can barely pass a budget. The fatigue is real. And Winter is a decorated general in a country that loves generals. The last time a general launched a party and shook up the system was... well, it happens a lot, actually.
Rabin, Barak, Sharon, Mofaz, Ya'alon, Gantz. Israel has a thing for generals in politics.
It's practically a pipeline. But most of those generals ran as centrists or center-left. Winter is running as a hardline right-winger. That's unusual. The generals who enter politics usually position themselves as security-minded pragmatists who can make peace from a position of strength. Winter is saying: I'm not interested in peace, I'm interested in winning.
Which brings us back to the Hannibal Directive. That's the lens through which a lot of people see him. He's the general who was willing to risk an Israeli soldier's life to prevent a kidnapping. That's either the kind of decisiveness you want in a leader, or it's exactly the kind of ruthlessness you don't.
And the Israeli electorate is split on that question. Some see it as a war crime waiting to happen. Others see it as the kind of clarity that's been missing from the political leadership for years.
The electoral math is elegant on paper. But Hilbert has actually been in a room where this exact strategy was tried before.
Hilbert: It was two thousand two. I was doing communications for a party called the National Unity Party. Small operation. Four people in a rented office in Tel Aviv, one of those buildings where the elevator only works on Tuesdays.
National Unity Party. I vaguely remember that.
Hilbert: Most people don't. That's the point. We had a retired general — not Winter, a different one, a major general who'd commanded the Northern Command — and the pitch was exactly the same. Clean right. No corruption. Real security experience. Bibi's time is over. We had polling that showed us at six seats. The Jerusalem Post ran a profile calling us "the party that could remake the right."
What happened?
Hilbert: We got one seat. One. And the general resigned two weeks after the election and took a consulting job with a defense contractor. The party folded. I still have the campaign posters in a box somewhere.
What was the structural problem?
Hilbert: The problem is that the Israeli right doesn't split. It rents. Voters will flirt with a challenger in the polls, but when they get into the booth, they vote Likud. The fear of the left is too strong. Likud's entire electoral strategy for forty years has been: if you don't vote for us, the left will win. And it works. Every time.
But Winter is polling at eight to twelve seats. That's not one seat.
Hilbert: Polls are cheap. We had polls too. The question is whether Winter can hold those numbers when Likud starts spending real money on attack ads. And the attack ads write themselves. "Winter will put Lapid in the prime minister's office." It's not even a lie. It's just the math.
That's what I keep coming back to. Winter's entire problem is that he's right-wing enough to hurt Likud, but not right-wing enough to replace it — because replacing Likud means building a coalition, and building a coalition means either sitting with Netanyahu or sitting with the left. He won't do the first, and he can't do the second.
Hilbert: The founder of my old party — the general — he told me something I've never forgotten. He said, "The left doesn't love us. They love the idea of us. The moment we actually threaten Bibi, they'll remember they hate everything we stand for."
That's the lens for this whole episode.
Hilbert: It's been twenty-four years and I haven't heard a better summary of Israeli politics.
The question is whether Winter is different because the context is different. The war fatigue is real. The corruption fatigue is real. Netanyahu has been in power for most of the last fifteen years, and the country has been through four elections in two years, and there's a sense that the system is stuck.
Hilbert: I've heard that before too.
You've heard everything before.
Hilbert: I'm old. It happens.
But Hilbert, is there a version of this that works? Is there a scenario where a right-wing challenger actually breaks through?
Hilbert: Sure. If Netanyahu is indicted and convicted. If the war drags on for another two years with no resolution. If the economy tanks. If a bunch of things happen at once. But Winter can't control any of that. He can only control his message. And his message is good. "I'm the clean right. I'm the general who actually fights. I won't be Bibi's fig leaf." It's the best version of this pitch I've heard in twenty years.
High praise.
Hilbert: It's still probably not enough. But it's closer than we ever got.
That's the tension. Winter is the most credible right-wing challenger to Netanyahu in a generation. He has the military record, the religious credentials, the anti-corruption message, and the timing. And even with all of that, the smart money says he folds.
Because the structural forces are just that strong.
Hilbert: The Israeli right is a family business. Netanyahu is the father. Everyone else is a son who thinks he should be in charge. Eventually, the sons either come home or they leave the business entirely. They don't start their own.
That's a pretty good note to land on. The misconception here — and there are a few — but the main one is that Winter is a fringe extremist with no real support. He's not. He's a decorated general with a genuine following among religious Zionist voters and disillusioned Likudniks. The fringe label is a way to dismiss him without engaging with why he's polling at ten seats.
The corollary misconception is that "the left loves him" means they agree with his policies. They don't. They agree with his effect on the electoral math. It's a strategic appreciation, not an ideological one. If Winter ever got real power, the left would remember very quickly that he wants to annex the West Bank.
The open question is whether Winter actually follows through. The history of Israeli splinter parties says he folds back into Likud after the election, or his party fades, or he takes a cabinet post in a Netanyahu government and calls it a win. But the war context makes this cycle different. Three years of fighting without a decisive result changes what voters are willing to hear.
If he succeeds in splitting the right, it reshapes Israeli politics for a generation. If he fails, he's a footnote in the twenty twenty-six election post-mortem. And right now, we don't know which one he's going to be.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop, who has apparently been holding onto that campaign story for twenty-four years.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you want to send us a weird prompt about a political paradox, a forgotten general, or a party that everyone hates and loves at the same time, go to my weird prompts dot com.
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