The surprises from Abbas and Winter: the two politicians to watch to understand where Israel is heading

Tel Aviv. With five days to go before the deadline for submitting candidate lists, the race ahead of the 27 October elections remains wide open. This campaign, perceived as a matter of survival, has long been viewed as a ninth front in the war – the domestic one – and continues to revolve around the ‘Bibi-ists versus Ralab-ists’ dynamic (the latter being an acronym for ‘rak lo Bibi’, meaning ‘anyone but Bibi’). Although Netanyahu’s main challenger, former Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, has now overtaken Likud in most polls, neither bloc has yet reached the minimum of 61 seats required to form a government. Barring any last-minute withdrawals or sensational last-minute defections, this points to two nightmare scenarios for a country at war: a return to the “Israel of 6 October” – a phrase that has become established in common parlance to describe the return to the almost civil-war-like atmosphere that prevailed before the disaster – repeating the saga of five election rounds between 2019 and 2022; or the possibility of a minority government, that is, one with fewer than 61 seats, propped up by a tenuous external lifeline.

With the deadline for submitting candidate lists fast approaching and alliances taking shape, two significant events have occurred – the most interesting so far in this single-issue election campaign. The first concerns the unexpected recruitment by Mansour Abbas, leader of the Islamic Ra’am party, of Yoav Segalovitz: born in 1959, an Ashkenazi Jew, a high-ranking and long-serving police officer, a former MP for the staunchly secular Yesh Atid party and Deputy Minister for Internal Security. It was in this capacity that Segalovitz and Abbas began to forge the most daring and original alliance of this election campaign, characterised by AI and polarisation. As deputy minister, Segalovitz was tasked with combating the scourge of mafia-style organised crime afflicting the Arab community – which accounts for 21 per cent of Israel’s population – and to this end he worked closely with Abbas, who made history at the time by joining the ‘government of change’ led by Bennett and Lapid, which lasted just one year. This is the issue felt most urgently by the Arab electorate, as Abbas repeatedly emphasises, and it is on this agenda that he declares he intends to seek his votes, distancing himself from the alliance formed by the other three main Arab parties – Ta’al, Hadash and Balad – which recently joined forces because, on their own, they were struggling to clear the electoral threshold (3.25 per cent). Following Segalovitz’s announcement—who is listed in second place (but as an independent) on Ra’am’s list—they launched their attack: “Abbas has chosen a staunch Zionist over his own people”. Paradoxically, it is a politician associated with the modus operandi of the Muslim Brotherhood network who is bringing Israel closer, for the first time, to one of the visions of the ideologue of revisionist Zionism, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who a hundred years ago spoke of a future with a Jewish prime minister and a Muslim deputy prime minister. Abbas, 52, a mild-mannered, pragmatic and astute dentist who graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as a certified imam and accomplished preacher who knows the Qur’an by heart, is now the target of a two-pronged campaign to delegitimise him, making him one of the most heavily guarded politicians in Israel: on the one hand, his former allies, who call him a traitor because he recognises Israel as a ‘Jewish state’ (not out of love, but because it is a fact, as he always explains); on the other, the criminal organisations he ceaselessly declares his intention to crack down on; and finally, the colossal smear campaign launched against him by the current coalition, which brands him precisely as a secret member of the Muslim Brotherhood and lies knowing full well that it is lying, given that Abbas was a hair’s breadth away from a technical alliance with Netanyahu in 2021 – they met face-to-face on several occasions – had it not been for Smotrich’s veto. Everyone seems to be pretending to forget that, at that time, Arab towns were dotted with Bibi’s election billboards in Arabic, on which he had adopted the kunya ‘Abu Yair’.

In the polls, Abbas is predicted to win around five seats, as are several satellite parties that intend to position themselves as the key swing vote in the stalemate between the Bibists and the Ralabists. He needs Segalovitz on board to legitimise himself as a potential government ally, as well as to try to increase his hold on the Jewish electorate, who identify with the message that the former chief commissioner – founder, incidentally, of Police Unit 433, known as the Israeli FBI – put forward upon joining this unusual alliance: “The claim that, following 7 October, it is impossible to establish a partnership with the Arab parties is unfounded and false. Two fundamental emotions drive people to action: fear and hope. The political system uses fear to unite people; we, on the other hand, want to offer hope.”

Mirroring all this is the other interesting move of the week: “Winter has come”. With that surname, it was easy for the hawkish General Ofer Winter to launch a high-impact campaign complete with AI-generated footage in the style of Game of Thrones. Winter, born in 1971, is regarded as an unconventional general. Born into a secular family, he has long worn a kippah and became more religiously observant whilst studying during his pre-military year at the Eli Academy in the settlements, an institution considered hostile to the IDF establishment. On 7 October 2023, he made his way from the north to Kibbutz Be’eri to fight on the ground. A former commander of the Givati and Duvdevani units (the latter featured in Fauda), widely respected across the political spectrum for his heroism in the field, he served as military secretary under Liberman, Netanyahu, Bennett and Gantz during their tenures as Defence Ministers. A sworn enemy of ‘Conzeptsia’ – the miscalculation of the enemy’s intentions that led to the failures of 1973 and 2023. At the end of 2024, Winter left the IDF once he realised he would not be promoted. Since then, he has been courted by more or less everyone. Last week he made his move by launching his party: a non-sectarian list comprising secularists and kibbutz members, with the Arab-Israeli Christian activist Yousef Haddad – who served in the IDF – in second place. The key platforms of his ‘Amcha Israel’ – a slang term for ‘people’ that could be compared to Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ – include conscription for all, including Arabs, even in the form of civilian service; a plan for the ‘voluntary emigration’ of Palestinians from Gaza; and a thorough investigation into the causes that led to the massacre of 7 October, within both political and military ranks. In the polls, Winter is hovering around four seats, and Bibi now seems very angry with all the small right-wing parties that are devouring one another, putting the entry of the hardline minister Bezalel Smotrich into the next Knesset at risk. Ben-Gvir and Winter claim they do not wish to ally themselves with the leader of religious Zionism, because he is ‘narrow-minded’. Netanyahu still has three appointments at his discretion on the Likud list. Winter is no less radical than Smotrich, but he is a new face – perhaps the very face Bibi needs to try to rehabilitate himself with a White House that has every intention of pursuing many of Trump’s policies on the Gaza and Lebanon fronts. With or without Bibi.