Amcha Yisrael leader Ofer Winter doubled down on his call to encourage Palestinian emigration from Gaza and his opposition to a two-state solution at an event in Tel Aviv on Monday, as his new party dropped in the polls amid increasing attacks from the right.

Winter, 55, is a retired IDF brigadier general who was viewed in recent years as a potential political star on the Israeli right for his hawkish views. In August, he announced that he was founding Amcha Yisrael, a biblical reference that means “your nation of Israel.” 

Since then, his party has passed the electoral threshold in every published poll — until this week, when it dropped below the 3.25% line in two televised polls.

While Winter has said his party will recommend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to form the next coalition, and that it will not sit with Arab parties or the left-wing Democrats, parties in Netanyahu’s bloc have repeatedly come out against Amcha Yisrael. 

This week, old clips have surfaced in which the party’s No. 2, Yoseph Haddad, an Arab Christian influencer, and Knesset candidate Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, a former Jerusalem deputy mayor, appeared to back a two-state solution. Likud and Religious Zionism legislators pounced on Haddad and Hassan-Nahoum’s comments.

Amid poor polling and pressure from the right, Winter, Haddad and Hassan-Nahoum appeared at the Tel Aviv International Salon, an English-language forum for immigrants to Israel in their 20s and 30s. The conversation was moderated by Jewish Insider’s Lahav Harkov.

Asked about his deputies’ views on a possible Palestinian state, Winter declared: “There is no Palestinian nation.”

The idea of a Palestinian state is meant “to destroy Israel,” he added. 

Addressing the video clips, Winter noted that the one featuring Hassan-Nahoum was a description of President Donald Trump’s 2020 “Peace to Prosperity” plan, which, Winter pointed out, “our government supported. … Yoseph and Fleur tried to explain it because this is what they are doing [as advocates for Israel].” 

Hassan-Nahoum noted that the clip was from a debate with former Amb. Dennis Ross at the Council on Foreign Relations, in which she was arguing against a two-state solution. 

Haddad said that he changed his mind and began to oppose a two-state solution after the 2021 Gaza operation, and noted that, at the time of the interview in 2020, he was speaking positively about Israel in Arabic in a hostile Arabic media environment.

In addition, he noted that Netanyahu has supported Palestinian statehood in the past.

“Based on that [standard], Likud is not right wing,” Haddad said.

Before announcing the establishment of Amcha Yisrael, Winter and Haddad were offered senior posts in Likud. Asked why he rejected running with Netanyahu, but still plans to recommend him for prime minister, Winter pointed to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on Israel.

“We weren’t part of this failure. We came up [in politics] after it,” he said. “We came to fight for the people of Israel. We want to change the system. … We are going all over Israel, traveling last week to Acre, Nahariya, in Tel Aviv in the bars. We face the young people, the soldiers, and we see they want a change. They don’t want the same thing.” 

As for the party’s poor showing in the latest polls, Winter promised that it would “be the surprise of this election.” 

With regard to Gaza, Winter emphasized that Israel must “destroy Hamas and facilitate voluntary emigration from Gaza.”

Israel must “project power [so that] nobody is going to mess with us. They have to see the results for … opening a war against Israel. They’re going to pay,” Winter said of Hamas.

The former general said that “Trump gave us the OK” to encourage Gazans to leave, and about two years ago, then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant asked him to prepare a plan, but the government never moved forward with it. His plan would involve providing food and aid in the parts of Gaza that Israel controls, drawing the population out of the Hamas-controlled zone, and would open the door for Gazans to leave the Strip if they wish.

Haddad said the plan includes public diplomacy to convince third countries to accept Gazans. He would argue that those who welcomed millions of Ukrainians and Syrians escaping their war-torn countries must do the same for Gazans. He also called for shifting blame to Egypt, which has not let many Gazans leave through their shared border.

On the matter of Haredi conscription in the IDF, Winter said Amcha Yisrael’s plan is “you serve your country, you get [benefits]; you don’t serve, you don’t get” more than basic welfare, and keeping to that principle is a condition of the party’s entry into a coalition. He noted that in his time in the IDF, he opened two companies of Haredi soldiers. In addition, Amcha Yisrael proposed that Israel begin outreach to Haredi and Arab Israelis about the army and their options to serve when they are still in high school. 

When confronted with the fact that the Haredi parties left the coalition last year over a similar plan, Hassan-Nahoum emphasized that “we will pass it, because if we don’t, we won’t sit in that government, and that’s it. … We really hope that other parties that call themselves right-wing understand the moment we’re living in. We understand that this is a moment of change. Israel cannot afford to continue the way it has. We need a new social contract with the Haredim.” 

Haddad and Hassan-Nahoum, who was Israel’s special envoy for business and innovation, emphasized their experience in public diplomacy and criticized past governments’ efforts.

“What Qatar and the BDS [movement] have been doing in the West … certainly in America, is something unbelievable,” Haddad said. “The problem is that we did not wake up earlier to start tackling that problem.”

However, Haddad added that he “cannot accept” only blaming the government because there is a sharp increase of antisemitism around the world that began years before Oct. 7.

Haddad seeks to be Israel’s first Christian Arab cabinet minister. He specifically wants to be public diplomacy minister, and said he would institute weekly government press conferences in English, Arabic and Hebrew, and relishes the chance to confront anti-Israel questions head-on. “I can’t wait for the BBC to come. I can’t wait for CNN to come, and I can’t wait for Al Jazeera to come. Ahlan wa sahlan,” he said, welcoming the Qatari channel in Arabic.

However, Haddad faced an open indictment against him on a firearms charge, which, under Israeli legal precedent, would likely bar him from serving as a cabinet minister. 

The incident has generally been described as “road rage” in media reports, but Haddad said that a man approached his car window and threatened him, and he accidentally shot his gun inside his own car. The other man, Haddad said, was charged in the incident, as well.

“I am a man who obeys the law, and I believe that once I am in front of the judge and show all the truth and the facts, I will become the minister of public diplomacy. But if the law says otherwise, I bow down to the law,” Haddad said.