Israel Matzav: The Green Prince

The Green Prince

Two old posts have been getting a lot of hits today. One is this one from August 2008, which includes a lengthy interview video with Mosab Hasan Yousef, the son of Hamas Sheikh Hasan Yousef, in which Mosab talks about his conversion to Christianity and his escape to California. The other is this one from January 2009, which includes links to a six-part documentary about Yousef's life.

Yousef has become a hot item again because of an exclusive in Haaretz heralding an interview with Yousef that will appear in the weekend editions. The big story: Yousef was an informer for the Israeli security services until he left Samaria in 2007. I'm sure none of the Israelis is particularly surprised.

Yousef was considered the Shin Bet's most reliable source in the Hamas leadership, earning himself the nickname "the Green Prince" - using the color of the Islamist group's flag, and "prince" because of his pedigree as the son of one of the movement's founders.

During the second intifada, intelligence Yousef supplied led to the arrests of a number of high-ranking Palestinian figures responsible for planning deadly suicide bombings. These included Ibrahim Hamid (a Hamas military commander in the West Bank, Marwan Barghouti (founder of the Fatah-linked Tanzim militia) and Abdullah Barghouti (a Hamas bomb-maker with no close relation to the Fatah figure). Yousef was also responsible for thwarting Israel's plan to assassinate his father.

"I wish I were in Gaza now," Yousef said by phone from California, "I would put on an army uniform and join Israel's special forces in order to liberate Gilad Shalit. If I were there, I could help. We wasted so many years with investigations and arrests to capture the very terrorists that they now want to release in return for Shalit. That must not be done."

Yousef's memoir is being published next week (here's hoping someone gets me a review copy). Why now?

With his memoir, Yousef hopes to send a message of peace to Israelis. Still, he admits he is pessimistic over the prospect of Israel signing a peace agreement with the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, let alone Hamas.

"Hamas cannot make peace with the Israelis. That is against what their God tells them. It is impossible to make peace with infidels, only a cease-fire, and no one knows that better than I. The Hamas leadership is responsible for the killing of Palestinians, not Israelis," he said. "Palestinians! They do not hesitate to massacre people in a mosque or to throw people from the 15th or 17th floor of a building, as they did during the coup in Gaza. The Israelis would never do such things. I tell you with certainty that the Israelis care about the Palestinians far more than the Hamas or Fatah leadership does."

I doubt Richard Goldstone or the Europeans have ever heard of Yousef.

Here's more about the book and the full interview to be published Friday.

In his book, and in his interview with Avi Issacharoff (to be published in full Friday), Yousef exposes the methods by which the Shin Bet almost entirely obliterated the network by which hundreds of Israelis were murdered in terrorist attacks between 2000 and 2005.

Whether the Shin Bet learned of the book when Haaretz filed its article to the military censor earlier this week, or whether it knew of it earlier, Israel's internal security service had two options: try to prevent the book's publication or come to terms with it in the hopes of somehow using it to its advantage in the future.

...

Shin Bet decided not to comment on the matter. As far as is known, no significant pressure was applied on him to prevent the book's release, or even to prevent Yousef's former handlers from responding.

It's doubtful such efforts would ever have worked. Yousef is an extraordinary person who for years has lived on the edge, having violated his loyalty to his father, a Hamas leader in the West Bank, and the movement and nation in which he was raised. He unflinchingly put his life in danger to save Israeli lives, and both Yousef and his former handlers maintain money was not his primary motive.

Since fleeing the West Bank in 2007, he has burned every possible bridge, starting with his Haaretz interview the following year in which he denounced Hamas as a bloodthirsty band of terrorists and announced he had converted to Christianity. Now he has taken this betrayal a step further, revealing that for over a decade he worked for the Shin Bet.

To the Israeli reader - on the assumption that most of the book's contents are accurate - Yousef is an encouraging figure. As with other reports to emerge in recent years, his collaboration reflects the impressive intelligence coverage Israel has attained over its enemies.

I can't wait to see the interview and hope to read the book.

Israel Matzav: The Green Prince