Son of Hamas

Some of you may have seen the ubiquitous "Son of Hamas," Mosab Hassan Yousef, interviewed on TV. With his large sad eyes and earnest demenour he tells an incredible, all but unbelievable, story. He is the eldest son of one of the founders of Hamas, Sheikh Hassan Yousef. He was arrested by the Israeli security service, the Shin Bet, for whom he claims to have become an agent dubbed "The Green Prince," and to have provided information on many of his Hamas friends and colleagues, and who eventually converted to Christianity (itself a capital offense in Islam) and who now lives in the USA. I read the account of his "adventure" and I have to admit that I hardly found it credible.

It is well known that Israel has been highly successful in obtaining information on Palestinian terrorists, otherwise how could they make such precise targeted "hits" of individuals who are driving in cars in the midst of narrow alleys, or are caught hiding in "safe" houses. How or why other Palestinians give information on these terrorists is unclear, but they do. Either it is for money, given the hard times and little work that is available in the territories, or it is political, Fatah ratting out Hamas, or it is conviction, a visceral opposition to terrorism itself. The reasons Yousef became an Israeli agent are not always clear, but he started out doing it supposedly to protect his beloved father and his friends from being assassinated by the IDF. He rationalizes that by helping the Shin Bet to identify and find their targets and arrest them, rather than having them blown up by a missile through their car window or house, he is doing God's work. This seems to me to be self-deception, since of course the Shin Bet would rather arrest than kill their targets, so as to get as much information as possible from them.

Although the circumstances of a teenager arrested and brutalized by Israeli captors and then given preferential treatment because of his father's importance, and who then fell into an easy relationship with his Israeli handler, can be persuasive, some things grate. For example, for much of the book he talks about the Israeli actions that he is involved in as "we" did this and "we" did that. His identification with the actions of the Israeli security forces seems overstated, and his analysis of the situation on the ground seems too detailed and pro-Israel to be taken at face value. About half-way through this account I began to experience bouts of severe incredulity. Although he had a special position as his father's assistant, he credits himself at some points as basically being in control of all Hamas actions in all the territories. This is unacceptable. In contradiction he also claims that the real people running the Hamas terrorism campaign during the intifada were shadowy figures who were also unknown to him. At the same time as all his activities with the Shin Bet he was also regularly attending a Bible Class with a mixed group of Christians, Muslims and Jews, and yet he was never detected by Hamas security doing this. Sorry, I couldn't swallow it. Nevertheless, it makes for an exciting yarn, and will make a great movie. If true, it proves one thing, that you can never tell what is going on the mind of any man and the motivation of an apparently dedicated extremist can be far different than one thinks possible.