arts & entertainment
The Green Prince
A film about a Palestinian spy and his
Israeli handler.
George Robinson
Special to the Jewish News
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40
October 9 • 2014
JN
s the great American journal-
ist I.F. Stone once said, "All
governments lie:' and they
never lie more freely than when they are
conducting the business of spying.
For all the professions of national,
professional and tribal loyalties that are
earnestly voiced throughout Israeli film-
maker Nadav Schirman's documentary
film The Green Prince, it is ultimately
personal loyalty that governs the behav-
ior of its protagonists.
That outcome feels entirely appropriate
in a film about the hallucinatory world
of counterintelligence, double agents, lies
and betrayals that Mosab Hassan Yousef
and Gonen Ben Yitzhak inhabit. When
everyone around you is a professional liar,
you have to trust the person who tells you
the truth, however reluctantly.
The events that Schirman recounts
in the film began in 1983 and climaxed
during the George W. Bush administra-
tion. But given the events of the summer
of 2014, the story of Mosab, the eldest
son of one of the founders of Hamas, and
his unlikely pact with Gonen, a Shin Bet
agent, seems timelier than ever.
At the film's outset, each of these men
speaks retrospectively about the need
to contribute to the ongoing struggle
between Israelis and Palestinians.
The 17-year-old Mosab, the son of
Sheikh Hassan Yousef, decided that his
contribution would be an ill-conceived
attempt to smuggle guns to Ramallah:
"The goal was to kill Israelis:' he says.
Despite his amateurish precautions,
Mosab was apprehended and identi-
fied, and that event that threw him into
Gonen's path.
Access to a member of the equivalent
of the opponent's royal family (Mosab's
code name was derived from the green
color of the Hamas flag and his "royal"
pedigree among Palestinians) and, more
important, leverage over him, is the sort
of opportunity of which a counterintelli-
gence operative dreams. Factor in Mosab's
youth and striking naivete, and you have a
made-to-order asset for a spy agency.
One of the great strengths of The
Green Prince is that Schirman and
Gonen in particular bring a deliberate
and methodical clarity to the workings of
this hall of shifting mirrors.
The end result of the subtle collision of
spy and counterspy was a 10-year-long
collaboration, with Mosab providing
high-quality intelligence and access to
Mosab Hassan Yousef and Gonen
Ben Yitzhak in The Green Prince
Hamas activities to his Israeli handler.
As Gonen drily notes, "This is the
equivalent of [Hamas recruiting] the son
of the Israeli prime minister:'
As the film unfolds, it offers a privi-
leged glimpse into the complexities
through which a person can be detached
from his own community, even his fam-
ily, and put into a situation in which the
inexorable result is a complete reversal of
beliefs and behavior.
Such reversals are like a contagion,
though. Inevitably, a handler will come
to feel invested in the well-being of an
agent he is running and, as happened
to Gonen and Mosab, the larger institu-
tional loyalties may become outweighed
by the ties between two agents who have
shared more than just an occasional cup
of coffee.
Consequently, when Gonen oversteps
Shin Bet regulations for Mosab, it triggers
a series of unexpected occurrences. In the
end, the younger man leaves the Middle
East for San Diego, asking for asylum
from the U.S., only to have his past asso-
ciation with Hamas revealed to the highly
suspicious agents of Homeland Security,
who are only too happy to deport him to
Jordan and certain execution.
Schirman tells this endlessly fascinat-
ing tale through a mixture of testimony
by his two central figures, vivid surveil-
lance footage from (one assumes) Israeli
government sources, TV news clips and
murky re-creations.
It is a style and structure that would
feel rather forced were it not propelled
forward with a relentlessly breathless
rhythm.
The use of dramatic re-creations,
which are, by their nature, at least partly
invention, in nonfiction film makes me
uncomfortable. However, how else can
you show an audience what happened?
It's not as if governments routinely keep
audiovisual records of their most criminal
or covert activities. They're probably too
busy thinking about their next lie.
❑
The Green Prince is scheduled
to open on Friday, Oct.10, at the
Landmark Main Art Theatre in
Royal Oak.