On Feb. 11, a day before he left to attend the Warsaw Summit, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu summoned some 20 influential journalists and bloggers affiliated with Israel’s religious Zionist circles. The meeting was held at the Jerusalem Gardens Hotel near the Prime Minister’s Office, and participants were asked to arrive two hours ahead of time for a security sweep.

At about 7 p.m., Netanyahu walked in and sat down behind a small table covered with a white tablecloth on which a bottle of water had been placed. The guests sat close to him in a semicircle. No recordings or photos were allowed apart from a few photos taken at the beginning of the meeting.

Netanyahu devoted three hours to this off-the-record meeting in order to convey just one message: Absent a union among the splinter groups on the radical right, his right-wing government would lose the April 9 elections.

Various polls, including those Netanyahu commissioned (some of these were not published), indicate that the four extreme right parties will not get the number of votes they need to pass the Knesset-entry threshold of four seats. The Ichud Leumi (National Union) party is stagnant in the polls even after electing Knesset member Bezalel Smotrich to lead it. The same goes for HaBayit HaYehudi, formerly headed by Education Minister Naftali Bennett and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked and now by the former chief military rabbi Brig. Gen. (res.) Rafi Peretz. The third party is Otzma Leyisrael (Power to Israel), the most radical of them all, led by disciples of nationalist, racist Rabbi Meir Kahane, and the fourth is the Yachad (Together) party, led by the former head of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, Eli Yishai. Polls clearly indicate that none of the four will pass the electoral threshold, meaning garner more than 3.25% of the votes needed to get into the Knesset.