A new nationalist party threatens the one seat Netanyahu’s bloc cannot spare, and the two his rivals need
Ofer Winter launched “People of Israel” in Jerusalem on Tuesday. Polling suggests it clears the threshold by cannibalising Religious Zionism — in a race where the anti-Netanyahu camp has been stuck one or two seats short for a month.
Brig. Gen. (res.) Ofer Winter launched his party, People of Israel (Am Yisrael), at a Jerusalem event on 25 August, on a platform of pushing Gazan emigration and extending the draft to the ultra-Orthodox. “There is one solution in Gaza: migration,” Winter said, per Ynet’s account. His slate includes the Arab-Israeli influencer Yoseph Haddad, who told the launch that Israel needs a right-wing party “that understands the mentality of the Middle East,” and a bereaved mother. Netanyahu answered the same day from an event in the central West Bank, telling Hebrew media that “today we have three mushrooms after rain” — Winter, Moshe Feiglin and Avi Maoz — and warning that votes below the electoral threshold are wasted while a party that clears it will bring down an existing one. The Times of Israel reports polling has People of Israel passing the threshold with votes drawn from Religious Zionism, which then falls below it; Ynet frames that as the specific fear of Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich, and reports an Otzma Yehudit–Religious Zionism merger is “not on the table.”
The arithmetic that makes this consequential was published on Monday evening. A Channel 12 poll, written up by Haaretz, put Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar first on 24 seats, the Netanyahu bloc unchanged at 50, and the combined Arab parties on 11 after three merged into a revived Joint List — leaving the Jewish opposition bloc on 59, two short of a majority. That is a deterioration within the same pollster’s own series: 60 on 11 August, 60 again on 18 August, 59 now. The Files could not establish the poll’s sample size or field dates and has not charted it. The institutional pressure is running the other way: Haaretz reports the High Court on Monday froze roughly NIS 400 million (about $134 million) in coalition funds earmarked for the Education Ministry and the Settlement and National Missions Ministry, money approved last month by the Knesset Finance Committee in a procedure opposition MKs call rushed.
Assessment: Both blocs are now hostage to rounding errors, which is why a party polling near the threshold is worth a prime ministerial insult. Netanyahu’s “mushrooms” line is not contempt for Winter’s politics — Winter’s platform is his coalition’s platform, further right — it is a warning that the right’s surplus is being spilled below the bar while the opposition’s 59 sits one merger away from 61. Read the Arab-party consolidation as the other half of the story: a revived Joint List on 11 seats changes what a 59-seat Jewish bloc can do, and turns coalition arithmetic into a question about legitimacy rather than counting. Treat any single poll in this range as noise until the trendline moves twice.