Is selling one’s soul to a parent’s worst enemy justified if it means avoiding torture, prison, or much worse? Such is the quandary at the crux of Nadav Schirman’s documentary The Green Prince, a tense and dense examination into how Mosab Hassan Yousef, a young Palestinian whose father was a founder of Hamas, ended up an informant for the Israeli security force known as Shin Bet. By the time viewers reach its bittersweet climax, prior documentaries about guarded family secrets will seem like Saturday-morning cartoons.
The 1993 peace deal between Israeli President Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Yasser Arafat brought only momentary relief before both sides unleashed an onslaught of missiles and muscles. Yousef, the oldest of nine children, grew up learning “to hate anyone in an Israeli uniform” and his father made a career of it as a highly placed and consistently vocal leader of Hamas. After his father is arrested, Yousef, then 17, is as well; perhaps it was his youth that made him attractive to Shin Bet as a possible informant.
Shin Bet member Gonen Ben Yitzhak becomes Yousef’s “handler” – the person responsible for the content and reach of his young informant’s assignments. And though it shouldn’t be surprising, it does raise conflicting feelings when Yousef begins to figure out that his own father is one of the people he’s been recruited to spy on, whether through basic eavesdropping or setting up a coffee table with surveillance equipment.
The movie mostly relies on interviews with the informant, now living in the United States, and the handler, who admits early on that their tangled relationship cost him his job. Schirman fills out the film with news reports of suicide bombings and dramatic footage shot from the air or through night-vision goggles. It succeeds as a true-life document about the ongoing strife of the region and as a solid narrative filled with espionage and betrayals.
The Green Prince | Dir. Nadav Schirman |95 minutes | Playing at the Leawood Theater, 3707 W. 95th Street, Leawood, Kansas, 913-642-1133.
