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.”
