Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich offered Ofer Winter a job in the Defense Ministry on Wednesday if he would pull out of the October 27 election, but Winter rejected the deal later in the evening and said he would not surrender. The offer came as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Smotrich stepped up pressure on Winter to leave the race, with the campaign entering its final stretch.
The timing matters because the Ofer Winter Election is being fought with less than a week left before Israelis vote, and Winter’s People of Israel Party has been hovering below or just above the electoral threshold. In that range, a few thousand votes can decide whether a party enters the People of Israel Knesset or disappears from the map, which makes every endorsement, warning and offer part of the same scramble for the right-wing bloc.
Winter had already said in a Channel 12 interview earlier on Wednesday that he sometimes wonders whether endorsing Netanyahu so early in the campaign was the right call, but he brushed that aside by saying, 'That is irrelevant. I am a man of my word and part of the national camp.' His party had endorsed Netanyahu for prime minister, and Yoseph Haddad, who holds the second slot on the slate, said that support would continue. Winter had also said he was seeking to be defense minister in the next government, which made Smotrich’s proposal look less like a simple favor and more like a trade built into the coalition math.
That is where the friction sits. Smotrich’s offer was said to come from the allocation granted to his Religious Zionist Party as part of potential coalition negotiations, and he also said Winter could be given authority to set up a voluntary emigration directorate for Gaza and a directorate for haredi enlistment and integration into the workforce. Winter answered by rejecting the premise entirely. 'You’ve got it wrong. We didn’t come for a job, as you’re accustomed to. We came to bring change and lead a new path,' he said. 'We came to serve those who serve, not to enable the continuation of political patronage and the division of positions. We will not surrender.'
Winter also said he would remain part of Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc if a law enforcing conscription and supporting those who serve in the IDF is passed. For now, the offer has been turned down and the race goes on, leaving the same unresolved question hanging over the final days before the vote: whether Winter stays in until election day or becomes the latest right-wing candidate to fold under the pressure to consolidate the field.
