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.

Truth be told, I thought he was naïve. I simply could not comprehend how a left-winger fromJerusalem could do it. I did not believe that the cooperation with Hamad, who at the time was not particularly influential in Hamas, would lead to a positive result.

I was wrong. The two “outsiders,” Baskin and Hamad, were able to establish a direct channel of communication between them and proved that not only was it possible to start a dialogue between Hamas and Israel, it was also possible to reach understandings, agree on them and even implement them.

In Freeing Gilad, Baskin relates how his relationship with Hamas representatives began. At the end of April 2006, even before the Shalit's abduction, Baskin was in Cairo for a UN seminar on promoting peace in the Middle East. A Palestinian friend from Gaza introduced him to Mohammed Megdad, a professor of