Bezalel Smotrich offered Ofer Winter a ministerial post in the Defense Ministry on Wednesday if he would pull out of the October 27 election. Winter turned him down later in the evening, keeping his campaign alive just days before Israelis are due to vote.
The offer was meant to use the ministerial slot tied to Smotrich's Religious Zionist Party as leverage in the right-wing race. It also underscored how tightly the campaign has narrowed around the question of whether Winter's People of Israel Party can cross the electoral threshold, or whether its votes will be too thin to matter.
Winter has already aligned his party behind Benjamin Netanyahu, but the numbers have made that endorsement fragile. The People of Israel Party has been polling below or just above the threshold, and Winter himself said earlier on Wednesday that he had sometimes wondered whether backing Netanyahu so early was right or wrong. He brushed that aside, saying he was a man of his word and part of the national camp.
What he would not accept was a job in exchange for stepping aside. Winter said Smotrich had it wrong, that his camp did not come to the race for positions, and that it had come to bring change and lead a new path. He added that the party came to serve those who serve, not to enable political patronage and the division of positions, and said, plainly, that it would not surrender.
That refusal left the deeper dispute intact. Winter said he would stay in Netanyahu's right-wing bloc only if a law enforcing conscription and supporting those who serve in the IDF is passed, even as Netanyahu pressed him to withdraw immediately. In a statement later released through Likud, Netanyahu argued that Winter was not passing the threshold in any of the polls and urged him to leave the race now to help save the right from a dangerous left-wing government.
Smotrich's pitch also went beyond the ministerial title. His party said Winter would be given full authority to establish a voluntary emigration directorate for Gaza, while Smotrich said he would also offer a directorate for haredi enlistment and integration into the workforce. But the bargain did not hold. With Winter rejecting the offer, the race now moves toward October 27 with the same unresolved question hanging over it: whether he stays in, and whether his party can survive the threshold fight that has made him a target of pressure from both Netanyahu and Smotrich.
Earlier in the day, Yoseph Haddad, who holds the second slot on the People of Israel Knesset slate, said the party would continue to back Netanyahu for prime minister despite what he described as a campaign of smears and pressure. That stance leaves Winter boxed in politically, but not yet out of the race.
