That was underscored this week when Netanyahu reiterated on social media that Israel was "not a state of all its citizens" that it did not belong to the fifth of its citizens who are Palestinian but exclusively to the Jewish people around the world.
Netanyahu's reliance on Otzma Yehudit follows a recent split in another extreme party in his coalition, Jewish Home, that is close to the fanatical religious wing of the settlers. Jewish Home's political "stars", Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, both government ministers, recently left to create yet another far-right party called the New Right.
Need for extra votesWhat was left of the Jewish Home party risked falling just short of the electoral threshold, which needs to be surpassed before a party wins seats in the Knesset. That would result in all its votes being lost, and thereby provide a boost to Netanyahu's chief opponent, Blue and White, a party led by Benny Gantz and other generals.
Gantz may then be in a position to create an alternative governing coalition made up of the right and centre, and supported informally by a bloc of Israeli-Palestinian parties.
So Netanyahu threw caution to the wind and arm-twisted Jewish Home into making an electoral pact with Otzma Yehudit. Together, they hope to hoover up enough votes to gain a clutch of seats and thereby prop up another government led by Netanyahu's Likud party.
In fact, Otzma Yehudit is the successor to Kahane's original party, Kach, which briefly entered the Israeli parliament in the 1980s.
Then, the electoral threshold was much lower, and Kahane was able to win a single seat for himself. But his explicit anti-Arab racism and calls for violence were so discomfiting to the other parties that they shunned him in the Knesset.
Given the added exposure, however, Kahane's popularity grew. With the prospect of Kach winning several seats in the next election, the parliament amended the election laws to prevent the party from standing. Kahane was assassinated in the US shortly afterwards, in 1990.
When one of his followers, Baruch Goldstein, shot more than 150 Palestinian worshippers in Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994, killing 29, Kach was outlawed as a terrorist organisation.
Manipulating the legal systemBut Kach never went away. It didn't even go properly underground. It flourished in many of the settlements deep in the occupied Palestinian territories, and its former leaders became household names.
The settler youths it cultivated torched olive groves, then mosques, and more recently Palestinian families. The Israeli police and intelligence services made little effort to find the culprits.
But while its violence continued, its leaders grew more sophisticated in the ways they learned to manipulate Israel's political and legal systems.
Ben-Ari's deputy, Itamar Ben-Gvir, became a lawyer, finding that it was easy to exploit the reticence of the criminal justice system to prosecute Jews who harm Palestinians.
Related "charities" have promoted Kach's brand of Jewish supremacism and terrorism, including Lehava, which uses intimidation and violence to stop Jews and Palestinians from dating or even mixing.
Threatened with a nooseSince Kach formally reinvented itself as Otzma Yehudit ahead of the 2013 election, it's been looking for a way back into parliament. But to the evident delight of its leadership, its brand of anti-Arab racism has in the meantime become so mainstream that Netanyahu can afford to offer it a place in the bosom of the next government.
Netanyahu's backing for these Jewish supremacists is a clear signal about where the Israeli right plans to push the country next. The evidence has been building for some time that the Netanyahu right has moved remarkably close to Kahane's positions of three decades ago.
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