A double life

Working extensively from Mosab Hassan Yousef's book, Son of Hamas, with lots of illustrative footage, some of it artificial or reconstructed, Israeli documentary filmmaker tells the story in this absorbing film about the Palestinian youth, beloved eldest son of fiery Hamas leader and cofounder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, the "Green Prince" (his code name) who became a key secret agent for Shin Bit, Israeli intelligence. The talking heads are two and only two, Mosab and his Shin Bit handler, Gonen Ben Yitzhak, with whom he worked for ten years. This is above all the story of a surprising intimacy between two men from opposite sides who became friends fiercely loyal to each other. In its outlines of course this is a sideline on recent history of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, of Fatah and Hamas, the Intifada and the death of Yasser Arafat and the hardening of the conflict over the last two decades, terrorism and the other side's strategies to oppose it. But this is more than that a study of espionage and the complex psychology involved when a man chooses to spy for the other side, to become, in the eyes of his own people, a traitor. In this The Green Prince sheds some light on the kind of material John Le Carré has spent a writing lifetime delineating: the equations of loyalty and betrayal, torture and lies, idealism and brutality, the strict rules of the game and those who choose to break them all. The saying is "you could not make this up," but of course Le Carré has made it up. But here it is in the flesh, in a very real and contemporary example. Nadav Schirman's film joins an elite group of bold recent Israeli political documentaries that includes three from 2012, Ra'anan Alexandrowicz,'s The Law in These Parts, about Israeli judges, Dror Moreh's The Gatekeepers, about the machinations of Shin Bit, and The Lab (Yotam Feldman), on how Israel tries out new weaponry on Palestinians.

Mosab Hassan Yousef tells his own story. Taught to hate Israel, son of a chief leader of the most militant anti-Israeli group, Hamas, Mosab at seventeen gets together with some friends with illegal weapons in a car planning to do some harm, and he is captured, jailed, tortured, and interrogated. His interrogator is Gonen Ben Yitzhak, who trained in psychology, and senses a sympathy in Mosab. The youth is imprisoned with members of Hamas whose murderous cruelty toward each other, torturing some fellow prisoners to death, leaves him disenchanted, after already agreeing to "help" Shin Bit with the thought that he will use this position to his own ends. He may have indeed saved lives; of course he was also a youth having fun playing a dangerous game that made him in his way as powerful as his high-profile father.

Mosab always remains his own man. As he says at the outset, spying for Israel was an act that in the eyes of his society was worse than raping his own mother, but he saw himself as saving lives, not only many Israeli lives but the life of his father, to whom he remained close, without ever agreeing as Shin Bit would have liked and his father too, to become active in Hamas. Yet he remained close to his father and by his side in his public role, as we see in many clips. (Presumably, many of these clips were made by Shin Bit, but how then the filmmaker came into possession of them given Gonen's falling out with the organization is unexplained.) This goes on for ten years, when finally Mosab can't stand telling lies any more, and Gonen realizes it's over. His kindness to Mosab leads to Gonen's being relieved of duties. Intelligence wants to send Mosab to Europe but somehow he got to the US, where he was alone and friendless in a new land. He felt moved to talk about what he did and wrote Son of Hamas. Then Homeland Security wanted to deny his request for political asylum and on the basis of his youthful identification with anti-Israel terrorism, to deport him. Shin Bit won't help. He's a spy left out in the cold. But Gonen comes to San Diego and intercedes with revelations of Mosab's important role for Israeli intelligence, and he is not deported. The two men remain friends and talk every week. Gonen all along has been a second father figure for Mosab; yet Mosab loved and supported his own father (except the murderous early policies he himself later turned against), and in his own way considered himself to be protecting his father, even by asking him to be taken to jail.

The fascinating thing is that both Gonen and Mosab emerge as in their own way good men who have lived up to their own complex personal moral principles. Though Mosab's claims his father affirmed that he would always be his son, officially Hassan Yousef and the rest of the family have understandably disowned Mosab. Are these two men glamorous, brave, complex, simple, remarkable, despicable? You be the judge.

The Green Prince , 95 mins., was the opening night film at Sundance 2014. Limited US theatrical release (NYC, LA) was 12 September 2014. It comes to the San Francisco Bay Area 10 October.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.