The march had been called in the wake of the attacks in Paris last week in which two gunmen murdered twelve people at the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo, and a third murdered four people at a Jewish grocery store.
Netanyahu evidently could not resist the publicity given that it is election season in Israel, and he would not want to risk being upstaged by political rivals who had announced their attendance, including such violent racists as foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman and economy minister Naftali Bennett.