Hamas hasn’t left the news cycle—both in a negative light and, from pro-Palestinian quarters, in a positive one. Yet back in 2010 a book came out about the organization that shows it from the inside—and hardly in a laudatory vein.
It’s called Son of Hamas, and with good reason: it was written by Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, one of the seven founders of this Palestinian group. The eldest child in his family, Mosab was raised fully in line with Hamas policy. At 18 he was arrested by Israeli law enforcement for attacks on Israeli soldiers. About a year later he was released and for a long time became his father’s trusted aide.
Only no one knew that from that moment he spent nearly ten years working for Shabak (Shin Bet), Israel’s security service. During that time he managed to prevent numerous terrorist attacks and save many lives on both sides. He helped in the arrest of high-ranking Hamas operatives, and in 2007 he left the Middle East; three years later he was granted political asylum in the United States—something that required Israeli services to officially reveal his identity.
Mosab renounced Islam and in 2005 was secretly baptized in Tel Aviv. Since then he has been an outspoken opponent not only of Hamas but of Islam as a whole.
In his book he tells about his life and how he came to the decision to work for those whom, since childhood, he had been taught to see not merely as an enemy but as subhuman, unworthy of life. He currently lives in the United States, and after the October 7 attack he spoke out actively not only against Hamas but also stated that Islam is not a religion of peace. In some cases, pro-Palestinian students disrupted his appearances, calling him an Islamophobe. In others, supporters of Israel invited him to speak at another university.
For me, Mosab seems like one of the few who not only tells the truth about Hamas in the Western world, but also cannot easily be silenced as “brainwashed by Zionism.” His background and story show that he at least knows what he’s talking about—unlike many who march with “from the river to the sea” placards and can’t even say which sea and river they’re talking about.
But let’s talk about the book itself.
Interestingly, he dedicates the book to his father and his family—fully aware that for ten years he worked against everything his father had built, against the faith his father had instilled.
Mosab begins his story with his father’s biography—a man who was by no means a killer or a monster. Hassan Yousef was a well-educated person; he wanted to make people’s lives better and joined the Muslim Brotherhood, whom he saw as religious reformers of Islam—much as Martin Luther was for Christianity.
Over nearly thirty-five years—from the time Mosab’s father began strengthening the Muslim Brotherhood on the occupied territories to the day Mosab himself left for the West—the organization traveled a long road from its original aims and the desire to help the downtrodden, becoming one of the most brutal terrorist groups in the Middle East, to whom even the lives of the very Palestinians for whose sake it had all begun no longer mattered.
Mosab shows how the organization gradually gained strength, how the desire to reclaim their land turned into a desire to destroy Israel and all Jews, and how Hamas was merely looking for a pretext to justify warfare and violence against Israel. Already as a teenager, he and his friends tried to inflict at least some harm on Jews passing by—and if they could kill, all the better. Meanwhile, his father was becoming a hero who had done time in an Israeli prison—a sheikh of an ever more fearsome organization.
Describing his time in prison, Mosab doesn’t try to whitewash Israel. You couldn’t call the treatment he received humane—though it’s nowhere near comparable to what we’ve seen done to hostages captured by Hamas, to say nothing of those killed. And that makes his story all the more believable, as he shows how, slowly but surely, they managed to persuade him to help Shin Bet.
Yes, you could call it brainwashing—intelligence services train people to persuade. But while at first Mosab indeed agreed to “cooperate” in order to ferret out the secrets of those evil Jews and harm them, over time his worldview changed radically. In the book he shows how this happened, the inner struggle he went through, and that none of it was a decision made in a single day.
Gradually he begins to understand that Hamas’ goals are by no means about helping his people—the dream his father once had. And so he slowly becomes an ever more loyal helper to Israel and, in the end, effectively betrays the organization, though not his family: he believes he is acting for the good of his people and his loved ones, even if they don’t see it that way.
It’s possible Mosab embellished parts of his story; even so, it doesn’t read as heroic. It’s full of wavering and choices between good and evil, faith and loyalty—however grandiose that may sound.
The book reads not just as an autobiography, but as the story of a man who lets you look into the thoughts and feelings of those who are now trying to present themselves to the world as aggrieved little lambs, while at the same time being ready, without remorse, to kill all Jews and those who sympathize with them—without hesitation, regardless of sex or age.
It’s one of the best biographies I’ve ever read, because it’s filled with emotion and bitterness, with faith and disappointment. And most of its events are borne out by history. The only thing I don’t understand is how Mosab isn’t afraid to travel—there must have been a price on his head for a long time.
My rating: 5/5
