Palestine state will never exist, says son of Hamas founder

 Mosab Hassan Yousef is an unlikely Israeli hero. As the oldest son of Hassan Yousef, a co-founder of Hamas and its spiritual leader in the West Bank, Mr Yousef rose through the ranks of the terror group as a child and saw the militants’ atrocities first-hand.

But after a stint in Israeli jails as a teenager for smuggling arms, he changed sides, secretly emerging as a Shin Bet spy embedded in the terrorist organisation his father helped run – a position he held for almost 10 years.

Known as the Green Prince, Mr Yousef became Israel’s most valuable asset, sharing vital intelligence on suicide bombings, shootings and stabbings during one of the bloodiest periods in the 70-year conflict.

He is now one of the most vociferous critics of the Palestine resistance movement – what he calls “Palestinianism” – and his invectives are not reserved only for Hamas but for nearly all civilians in the occupied territories.

Just as the UK, France, Canada, Portugal and other Western democracies stand poised to formally recognise Palestine as a state at the UN in New York on Monday, Mr Yousef says no such country exists.

The case Mr Yousef wants to make is not a palatable one to many. He believes that Palestine is an “artificial construct”, that Palestinians should drop their identity if they are ever to thrive, and that “Palestinianism” is a cultish curse that threatens not just Israel, but the wider world, especially the West.

“Palestinianism is a political, violent movement, and self-proclaimed Palestinians are those who are profiting out of the Palestinian cause. They are the perpetrators… nowadays I make no distinction between Hamas and Palestinians,” he says.

The identity he grew up with, he now rejects in its entirety. The Oct 7 massacre and Gaza’s obliteration in its wake, he sees the inevitable consequence of an identity forged in “violence and victimhood”.

“Most of the rapes, atrocities, beheadings, burning people, burning corpses; most of the atrocities that happened were committed by Gaza civilians, not the Hamas Nukhba [military wing]. The truth is, Hamas couldn’t control it.”

Mr Yousef’s story is a remarkable one and although politically he has ended up in the same camp as the Israeli prime minister, his thinking bears little resemblance to that of Bibistim, the name given to Benjamin Netanyahu’s core base.

Indeed, he thinks the “delusion” his people have been trapped in can apply as much to them as anyone else, Jews and Christians included. His beef, he says, is with the “sheep” of the world; people who blindly follow, rather than assert their individualism to “save themselves” and others.

“You know, the sheep is going straight to the slaughterhouse,” he says. “The sheep thinks that the shepherd is their best friend. That’s the problem with the sheep. They follow. Why? Because the shepherd gives them security.

“But eventually, it’s not in the interest of the shepherd to save the sheep. Yes, they feed them, but only so they qualify for slaughter. And this is the reality of so many people. It feels very safe, especially when you are in a herd. But the herd is going only in one direction. It’s the reality of most people. This is the reality of the world.”

In the West Bank, Mr Yousef witnessed Yasser Arafat, the Egyptian-born founder of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) encourage his father to do “whatever it takes” to fuel the second intifada, the 2000-2005 uprising in which more than 4,000 people (1,010 Israelis and 3,179 Palestinians) were killed.

And in prison, where he spent more than 25 months across various stints (several in the Hamas security wing among would-be suicide bombers he thwarted), he would handle classified documents handed down by Yahya Sinwar, the brutal Hamas enforcer who would later become the mastermind of the Oct 7 massacre.

Mr Yousef’s work for the Shin Bet is well documented. He is credited with helping stop dozens of suicide attacks and assassinations, saving many lives on both sides of the conflict.

But less well known are his motivations and thinking. He sees, for example, the Oct 7 attack – and in particular the pogrom that followed it – not as an act of resistance but the inevitable consequence of a political cult long since infected with violence.

The rot, he says, starts with firebrands like his father, a “man with good in him” but who “always wanted to please others” and is as much a part of the herd as a leader within it.

Once such men accept the principle of violence, it accelerates, first with army targets, then civilians, then stabbings, then suicide bombings, says Mr Yousef. His father was seen celebrating Oct 7, an image which friends say has deeply affected Mr Yousef.

“They agreed [to violence] only because they thought it would be treason to say: ‘No.’ Not: ‘We morally oppose that. It’s not good. It’s not good for our cause.’ We did not have that. Nobody talks about it.

“Show me one article of a prominent Palestinian leader who said, ‘F--- this! This is not us!’. You know, even today on social media, you don’t find people who speak out. They can’t even make a fake account to talk about it. No one. It seems like everybody’s complicit.”

‘Victim narrative’

Mr Yousef does not doubt the “brutal suffering” of the two million people in Gaza, or even that “war crimes” are being committed. But Oct 7, he says, is “what happens after 36 years of indoctrination, glorifying suicide bombings, glorifying martyrdom, a culture of murder [and] the indiscriminate targeting of civilians as resistance”.

“What do you think? Do you think all this collective consciousness pushing violence in is going into the void? Of course not. It’s going to lead to the destruction of something. And it did not start with the Oct 7 attack. It’s an evolution since Hamas came to power and before that, with Palestinianism and the victim narrative.

“There was the first intifada, then the second, but still it was not enough. How about now we self-inflict a total destruction over our people, where we sacrifice and weaponise as many civilians as we can. If this is what it is to promote our cause, then so be it. Let’s burn it all down to ashes. This is Sinwar’s strategy. And what we are witnessing is the outcome of his work”.

Mr Yousef has in the past expressed different views on Arabic media, with critics suggesting he is to some extent a chameleon. He once wore a keffiyeh during an interview, and on Al-Arabiya he is reported to have said: “We will have our victory against Israel” and that “Israel is the problem and as an occupation it needs to end”. Both, however, were some years ago.

His relationship with his mother, father and seven younger siblings ended after he left the Shin Bet, fled to California and wrote a bestselling book, Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices, which was published in 2010.

“My last conversation with my father was a couple of days before the book was published. I told him what to expect. At that time he was in an Israeli prison and when the book was published, the news came like a tsunami in our town and across the Middle East. Since then, we haven’t spoken.”

His love for his family is evident and he does not doubt the pain he has caused, saying that his defection “broke bones”. He does not regret what he did, however, saying it saved his life and almost certainly his father’s, who is once again out of prison.

He hopes he may one day be understood by his mother at least, but sees the divide between them as deep as the conflict itself. For the moment, they remain in “different realms”.

“This is when I lose my hope that the conflict can ever be reconciled,” he says.

‘Excitement and thrill’

Mr Yousef is candid about his recruitment to Shin Bet and says it came from a mix of motivations. A documentary made about him, The Green Prince, suggests the turning point came after he first witnessed the violence Hamas dished out to other prisoners in jail, but he says this is too simple.

“People are always asking for a turning point. It’s very hard for them to trace or follow the chain of events that shape you. So in prison, yes, it was brutal, and what I witnessed made me ask many questions. But it was not only that. There was the brutality of the wider culture. The honour killings, where women, if they brought shame on their families, were slaughtered by their relatives, for example. Why? It’s about shame and honour. It’s a power thing.”

This aspect, one suspects, would have been felt particularly acutely by Mr Yousef, who was raped as a child by a stranger that his father entrusted to walk him home from an olive grove.

There was also the excitement of being a spy, the risk-taking, the “manipulation and the power” it conferred. “You know when an intelligence agency is behind you, your meetings are not just ordinary meetings for coffee. There was no meeting that I did not have dozens of security guards and drones and snipers and all types of people, some visible some invisible about. So you get into a very, very big play.

“And I lie to you if I tell you as a youngster, moving armies in and out, protected by the most powerful intelligence service, that it was only about saving human lives. There were other aspects, many, including the excitement and the thrill.”

The risks Mr Yousef ran were extraordinary. Working as his father’s chief aide, responsible for Hamas in the West Bank, his primary role for Israel was to disrupt and prevent the long series of suicide attacks Hamas was planning, often one or more a day.

He sat with bombers preparing their explosive vests and when he failed to stop them, he was sent video footage of the explosions, so the bombers could quickly be identified and their wider networks exposed.

“We had hundreds of those during the second intifada, hundreds, so every time when, minutes after the explosion, they received [footage of] the suicide bombing scene, I would receive it. It’s the ugliest thing you can imagine… now it becomes your personal responsibility... You are dancing with death on every corner, and the goal is basically to save your own life and save as many lives as you can.”

Mr Yousef owes his life, at least twice over, to Gonen Ben Itzhak, now an Israeli lawyer and prominent critic of Mr Netanyahu and his government. For nearly a decade, Mr Itzhak was his handler in the Shin Bet, the agent on the Israeli side who ran him. He saved his life when, gathered with some of Hamas’s most senior leaders in the midst of the Intifada, he refused to order a helicopter to bomb the house in which they were holed up.

Later he flew to the US, to testify in Congress that Mr Yousef really was the Israeli asset he claimed to be, preventing his deportation to Jordan and almost certain capture by Hamas. The Shin Bet had refused to confirm Mr Yousef’s credentials to the US authorities.

Both men light up at the mention of the other, despite their deep political differences. “I always honour Gonen for what he is and what he did,” says Mr Yousef. “This is a friendship for eternity that can never be compromised by our differences.”

Mr Itzhak agrees, describing their relationship as “deep and unbroken”. He says their politics are “directly opposite” but suggests they come from the same root – each one understanding their own societies but not fully appreciating life in the other.

Mr Yousef’s analysis of Palestinian culture as hopelessly trapped in “victimhood and violence”, equally applies to large parts of Israeli society today and, unless corrected, could go the same way, says Mr Itzhak.

“I can never see or experience what he experienced, especially when it comes to Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, so I cannot judge him for what he feels or the way he sees things. But I see it from where I am from and I don’t think that he understands completely or deeply what’s going on inside Israel socially and with this government, and with the religious Right wing, which, for me, is even a threat to the way I live. I’ve told him but we agree to disagree.”