Secret Israel-Hamas Channel Freed Gilad Shalit
In a new book, Israeli academic Gershon Baskin reveals the back channel he established with Hamas that led to the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
Gershon Baskin’s Freeing Gilad: The Secret Back Channel was recently published by Kinneret Zmora-Bitan.
“It is the greatest thing I have done in my entire life. I have no doubt about that,” wrote Baskin at the beginning of his book. And, indeed, he did it against all odds and despite the heavy dose of skepticism and ridicule from those who led the negotiations on behalf of the government except for one person — former Mossad agent David Meidan, who was able to recognize the benefit a person like Baskin could provide and worked with him until the moment that abducted soldier Gilad Shalit stepped foot on Israeli soil, on Oct. 18, 2011. “Thank you for being an insufferable nag,” Meidan wrote in a thank you letter sent to him after the deal was done.
Gershon Baskin succeeded where others had failed. He was able to open a secret back channel with Hamas and brought Shalit's captivity to a happy ending, after five years and four months, in exchange for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.
I met Gershon Baskin for the first time in 2009, about two-and-a-half years before they signed off on the deal. We spoke in his office in Jerusalem at the Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information, a joint Israeli-Palestinian public policy think tank dedicated to promoting the "two states for two peoples" solution. There he told me about the relationship he had established with Ghazi Hamad, former aide to Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, and the hard work he was investing to free Gilad.
