Mosab Hassan Yousef may be the most hated Palestinian in the world. From 1997 to 2007, he worked undercover for Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet, exposing suicide bombing plots before they could explode into fruition. He was a prize catch, being the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, one of the founders of Hamas, Israel’s arch foe. To his credit, he tacitly admits he’s a traitor. “To collaborate with Israel is the most shameful thing a Palestinian can do,” says Yousef, who lives in California today.
Yousef’s journey from anti-Israel firebrand to secret Israeli agent is the subject of Nadav Schirman’s absorbing documentary, The Green Prince, which opens in Toronto and Vancouver on Oct. 17 and in Montreal on Oct. 20.
The Shin Bet operative who recruited Yousef and who formed a special relationship with him, Gonen Ben Yitzhak, is also at the center of the film, which is based on Yousef’s book, Son of Hamas.
“Recruiting is a very difficult art,” Ben Yitzhak observes, saying that the purpose of the exercise is to persuade new recruits to cross red lines — to do things they would have conceived unimaginable.
Born in the West Bank town of Ramallah in 1978, Yousef was the eldest of eight children, raised in a home suffused with Islam and Palestinian nationalism. “Hamas was our family business,” he says. “Our identity.”
Yousef’s father, a top Hamas leader in the West Bank who spent close to 16 years in Israeli prisons, was his role model. “I was very proud of him,” he says. Yousef claims he was not taught to hate Jews. But Israel’s occupation of the West Bank consumed him with anger and a desire for vengeance.
Arrested at the age of 17 for arms smuggling, Yousef was thrown into a jail filled with Hamas-affiliated terrorists. The violence and brutality he witnessed there turned him against Hamas. Ben Yitzhak contacted him upon his release, and Yousef, much to his own surprise, became an informer.”No one put a gun to my head,” he says, adding he was treated with care and respect, like a valued olive tree, a prime possession in Palestinian society.
Ben Yitzhak was pleased to be his handler. As he says, “We didn’t know much about Hamas at that time.”
Yousef’s father, who was released from prison shortly afterward, appointed his son as his personal assistant and gatekeeper. Yousef became an excellent source for the Shin Bet, and according to Ben Yitzhak, he loved the work and was addicted to it. “He was not just a source. He was there for us all the time. He was with me 150 percent.”
Being opposed to suicide attacks, Hamas’ signature method of attacking Israel during the second Palestinian uprising, Yousef was only too glad to help Shin Bet. In addition to nipping in the bud some of these deadly bombings, which traumatized Israel from roughly 2001 to 2005, Yousef was useful to the Israelis in Operation Defensive Shield, during which the Israeli army reoccupied much of the West Bank.
Yousef was rearrested by the Israelis to burnish his credentials as a Palestinian resistance fighter. Ben Yitzhak, however, suspects that Yousef’s father was aware of his activities on behalf of Shin Bet.
With the intifada having burned itself out, Yousef was offered a job as a Shin Bet agent in Europe. He declined, having grown weary of being an Israeli spy.
Now a convert to Christianity, Yousef acknowledges he was “conflicted” by his identity. Unfortunately, Schirman doesn’t bother to elaborate, which leaves a gaping hole in the film. Nor, perhaps understandably, is much said about Yousef’s new life in the United States.
Yousef’s family, though, has denounced and disowned him. And Yousef feels guilty about his betrayal. As he puts it, “I feel like I stabbed them in the back.” But Yousef has no qualms about his partnership/friendship with Ben Yitzhak, which he describes as brotherly and unbreakable.