By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO — While visiting cousins in Philadelphia last weekend, I mentioned I was a big fan of Homeland and wondered if they liked it too. They replied affirmatively, but questioned whether counterterrorism was conducted as brutally and unscrupulously as portrayed in the series. By coincidence I had a preview link for The Green Prince, a documentary about the relationship between Shin Bet handler Gonen Ben Itzhak and his prize source Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Hamas cofounder and spiritual leader Sheik Hassan Yousef. Together we watched the film to compare the reality of such undercover operations with their dramatization on television.
Focusing on Gonen’s and Mosab’s accounts of their collaboration, The Green Prince resembles its fictional counterparts in the high risks run by a mole who betrays his father and friends and the psychological manipulation employed by the intelligence agency to avoid his exposure as a spy. Mosab absorbed the hatred his father felt towards the Israel which periodically imprisoned him. Mosab was arrested at the age of ten for throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers during the first Intifada, something he doesn’t reveal in the movie. When Hamas tried to derail the Oslo peace process with a wave of suicide bombings, Mosab purchased a gun ultimately leading to his detention by the Shin Bet. He withstood being bound to a chair and blindfolded for days, but became ostensibly cooperative when Gonen interrogated him.
To dispel suspicions that he had been turned by the Shin Bet, Mosab was sent to prison where other Hamas members were incarcerated. There he witnessed Hamas inmates torture and kill those suspected of collusion with Israel. Appalled by their ruthlessness, he started to perceive Hamas as more evil than Israel, a viewpoint reinforced by the organization’s suicide bombing campaigns against Israeli civilians. Mosab emerged from jail in 1997 as Israel’s key source on the subversive activities of his father and the ringleaders of Hamas with whom he had contact.
Gonen went to great lengths to prevent Hamas from discovering Mosab’s secret. Once he canceled a Shin Bet raid on a Hamas cell planning to kill Israelis because it would be evident that Mosab had provided the intelligence about the plot. Another time Shin Bet staged a raid on his house and bombed part of it warned him in advance to flee. He also served another prison term to allay Hamas’ doubts over whether he was working for the Shin Bet.
While his Shin Bet superiors remained wary of Mosab’s loyalties, Gonen grew to trust him. He violated Shin Bet protocols by permitting him to enter Israel and briefly escape the stress he was experiencing. For this Gonen was fired. Mosab resented having to prove himself to a less empathic handler. He wanted to quit, but the Shin Bet demanded that he return to his duties following a respite in Europe. Instead, Mosab escaped to San Diego. The United States denied him immigrant status due to his connections with Hamas prompting Gonen to testify in his behalf and help reverse the decision.
The tale The Green Prince weaves was sufficiently riveting to garner the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Sun Dance Film Festival. Its cinematic presentation, however, does little to contextualize the story. It consists primarily of close-ups of its two protagonists alternating with documentary footage and grainy reenactments of the events shot from above as if by reconnaissance drones. The politics of espionage that pitted Gonen against Mosab get obscured since both men transcended the cycle of distrust that pitted them against each other.
Postscript: After viewing the film, I learned that Walid Shoebat and Pamela Geller had accused Mosab of being a double agent for Hamas and espousing a radical form of Christianity that calls for the destruction of Israel. Mosab did convert to Christianity. In the film he says this happened in the United States, but the Wikipedia entry about him which is based on his memoir Son of Hamas dates his conversion to during his service for the Shin Bet. I confess that I take charges levelled by Shoebat and Geller with a block of salt. Shoebat’s accusations occasioned a response from Gonen who contends: “Mosab helped Israel more than anyone can believe. This is why the Israeli Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee wrote him a letter of gratitude, perhaps the first of its kind in Israeli history. But somehow Walid Shoebat knows something Israeli officials missed?”
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Baron is a professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University. He may be contacted at lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com