Netanyahu and Hamas depended on each other. Both may be on the way out.
“In 2009, when Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power for a second run as Israel’s prime minister, a job he has held almost continuously since, he was confronted with a major change in the region: Hamas, a militant Islamist group, had been elected to power in the Gaza Strip three years earlier,” notes The Washington Post. “From the beginning, Hamas vowed to destroy Israel and, in his 2009 campaign, Netanyahu vowed to destroy Hamas. What happened instead was a decade and a half of uneasy coexistence, during which Netanyahu’s serial governments and Hamas’s leaders found each other useful for their own purposes.”