The Green Prince

Film (2014)

With Mosab Hassan Yousef, Gonen Ben Itzhak

The new documentary, The Green Prince, is a moving account of the relationship between an operative in the Israeli Secret Service (the Shin Bet) and Mosab Hassan Yousef, the so-called Green Prince, the son of one of the seven original founders of Hamas.

As a young Palestinian bent on revenge against the Israelis, Mosab was arrested and jailed by the Israelis. Unexpectedly, an agent of the Shin Bet approached him, asking him to become an Israeli informer. At first, Mosab thought that the agent, Gonen ben Yitzhak, then working under the name Captain Loai, was crazy.

But, as Gonen put it in this suspenseful and stirring documentary, “recruiting is an art.”

However, as Gonen ruefully adds, the day of his first encounter with Mosab was also the day that spelled the eventual end of his career with the Shin Bet.

Jailed in Megiddo Prison in Israel, Mosab recoiled at the horrible tortures Hamas’s prisoner “court” inflicted internally on fellow Palestinian prisoners they suspected of complicity with the Israelis. His despair was compounded when he was brutally raped by a trusted friend of his family. A deep isolation and detachment set in, and Mosab agreed to work with the Shin Bet.

He recounted how gently Gonen handled him at first, encouraging him to finish his education and then gradually immerse himself in his father’s inner Hamas world.

Eventually, Mosab became known as The Green Prince because of his close association with Hamas’s central leadership.

Director Nadav Schirman used Mosab’s and Gonen’s testimonies to effectively interweave their parallel perspectives into a single, moving and coherent chronicle. The effect is powerful, cumulative and dramatic.

For years, Mosab delivered intelligence to Gonen, and, at times, Gonen was forced repeatedly, in collusion with Mosab, to stage attacks upon his home and to commit him to jail, in order to avoid suspicion by those in Hamas with whom he consorted.

After Yasser Arafat’s death in 2004 and Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian elections of 2006, Mosab was burnt out. After years of lying under extreme pressure, he felt he needed a break. Gonen saw that and, against Shin Bet protocol, found a hotel where Mosab could rest. Shortly afterwards, Gonen was dismissed from Shin Bet. Mosab was given a new handler he didn’t like. The relationship between the agency and its prized informer slowly crumbled.

On its own, Mosab’s account is astounding in its revelations, and heartbreaking in its portrayal of an earnestly independent man caught in the web of a tragic situation.

When paired with Gonen’s story, a dramatic account of an enduring relationship emerges. This moving and important film conveys how two daring, independent men from radically different backgrounds came together in an unexpected way.

Though an exciting thriller about espionage, the emotional focus of this riveting tale, somewhat surprisingly, is the bond transcending the intelligence itself that develops between these two men.

This ingeniously edited and directed narrative could well have stood on its own; a haunting soundtrack seemed intrusive and unnecessary. Likewise, dramatized scenes of gun smuggling and arrests are less effective than actual documentary footage of such scenes as a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, within which give a truer sense of the tragic immediacies of the conflict within the lives of these two courageously independent men intersected.

– Charles Munitz (aka BADMan)

(Originally published as A Prince Among Men in a slightly edited version in The Jewish Journal of the North Shore, 9/18/2014)