Does it really make a difference what the various potential coalition partners believe on cardinal issues facing the country today? The government of Ehud Olmert believed in a negotiated peace process based on the road map, eventually leading to the creation of a Palestinian state as articulated at the Annapolis Conference. All of the parties that made up the Olmert government supported this goal, yet the government under Olmert didn’t even begin to implement its road map obligations.

Writing this week in the Jerusalem Post, Gershon Baskin, co-CEO of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, disclosed that for more than two years he had been in contact with a “senior Hamas personality” in Europe over the release of Gilad Schalit, the Israeli soldier captured by Hamas and held in Gaza since 2006. The Israeli government knew of those contacts and gave him permission to continue, Baskin says.

It’s hard to know how Gilad Shalit would be voting today, had he come home in time. It is doubtful that he would be casting has ballot for any of the politicians who have been in on the secret of the contacts with the enemy concerning the Shalit deal. Upon hearing the true story, it is quite possible that Shalit would in fact be voting for the Green Movement-Meimad, of which one of the founders is Gershon Baskin.

For an Israeli politician, Gershon Baskin has an unusual resume.
In the 1960s, he was protesting America’s war in Vietnam, not fighting against invading Arab armies. He grew up on Long Island marching for civil rights, not wandering the alleyways of Jerusalem’s Old City.
And that was all before his bar mitzvah.

Baskin says both his social conscience and his Zionism come from his Zionist youth movement, Young Judaea.

Gershon Baskin, one of Israel’s most prominent peace activists, describes his attempts to open a channel of communication between Israel’s leaders and Hamas.

The noted Israeli policy analyst Gershon Baskin observed, in an article in the Jerusalem Post just prior to Hamas’ electoral victory, how “Israel ‘s unilateralism and determination not to negotiate and engage President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority has strengthened the claims of Hamas and weakened Abbas and his authority, which was already severely crippled by … Israeli actions that demolished the infrastructures of Palestinian Authority governing bodies and institutions.”