Home Video Hovel: The Green Prince, by Dayne Linford
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The story itself is astounding. In the height of the continuing war between Israel and Hamas, Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet, scores one of the biggest coups of its history – the recruitment of a man on the inside, Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a top Hamas spokesman, as an informant for Shin Bet, codenamed “The Green Prince.” The Green Prince, almost entirely through extended interviews with Yousef and his handler at Shin Bet, Gonen Ben Yitzhak, tells this story, the recruitment of Yousef, his rise in Hamas to a position of enormous power and influence, and the eventual collapse of the operation.Yousef is the main subject of the documentary, while Yitzhak serves as a very close second, the film developing over time as a portrayal of competing father figures, a conflict, unspoken and unknown, between Yitzhak and Yousef’s actual father, the latter of whom Yousef loves dearly and strives to protect but whose worldview he has radically departed. The Green Prince draws nearly all its material from Yousef and Yitzhak, complemented by news footage and judicious reenactment. As such, the film is a very intimate portrait of these two people and their relationship, but loses the wider regional, political, religious, and moral perspective that is crucial to understanding anything in the Middle East.Most film, especially documentary film, is a carefully crafted argument, meant to carry the viewer along a journey and deposit them, hopefully inevitably, at the understanding and acceptance of the film’s point of view. The Green Prince is especially so – both Yousef and Yitzhak, and, in fact, Nadav Schirman, the director, recognize this as an opportunity to effectively have their day in the court of popular opinion, and each argues eloquently for the justification or condemnation of the events portrayed, advancing an interpretation of these actions as favorable to their perspective as possible.Schirman, through the use of his only available but nonetheless the most basic and powerful of film techniques (editing, close-ups), gets to have the most definitive say, particularly as his choices frame their stories and shapes their method of delivery. Partially, Schirman’s most overt goal is to build a narrative arc in their relationship, which he accomplishes admirably. But, just as theirs is, his perspective is overtly political. Schirman himself characterized the relationship as hopeful, choosing the climax of his film as when Yitzhak puts himself potentially in harm’s way to protect Yousef. The interpretation that Yousef represents Palestine and Yitzhak Israel, that their story is indicative of a potential peace between their nationalities, is unavoidable.But it is also potentially dangerous. Neither Yousef nor Yitzhak, especially the latter, who speaks of torture, terrorism and assassination in a matter-of-fact tone, deal in representations. This is the story of their real life, with immediate and profound personal and political stakes. Opposite from critic Anthony Kaufman’s assertion that “if they can do it…other Israelis and Palestinians (can) get along,” Yousef particularly strives to position himself as a political scion navigating a complicated and treacherous moral ground as successfully as possible, with potentially deadly consequences. Yitzhak, however, at least in interview, seems unperturbed by moral questions when dealing with the active logistical problems of keeping Yousef happy, effective, and alive. For them both, the potential of a violent death, even now, is very real, and seems to make quaint the question, “why can’t they get along?” To the contrary, they are merely individuals struggling for survival in a vast global framework of competing ideologies, values, market goals, and political agendas, for any and all of which a man or woman can, have, and will strap a bomb to their chest and detonate it in a market square.Because only Schirman, Yousef and Yitzhak’s voices and perspectives are acknowledged, this network, the historical and political circumstances that at least factor into, if not override, our decisions, are downplayed and sometimes missed. This is especially troubling because it emphasizes Schirman’s perspective, which, as director, is already overwhelmingly powerful. Documentaries have the obvious and much-discussed drawback of being taken not as argument but as truth, an eventuality especially troubling when your subject is something as labyrinthine as current Middle Eastern politics.To wit: when Youself talks about his desire, as a youth to kill Israeli police and militants, the audience is treated to an extreme close up of his eyes, first looking away, then gazing directly, seemingly menacingly, into the camera. What was most likely an innocuous or potentially otherwise meaningful expression is here rendered as menace from a man who, even in years of working with the Hamas, has never been known to be personally violent, simply by virtue of angle, frame and juxtaposition. By contrast, when Yitzhak speaks later in the film euphemistically of assassinating a Hamas, his argument is presented not as the cold calculation of systematized political murder, or, as Yousef’s, expression of violent perspective and temperament, but instead as a practical solution to an immediate problem. Again, when Yousef realizes Hamas is fomenting hatred against Israel by staging missile strikes, this is treated as deplorable, which it is. However, Israel’s rain of actual missiles throughout the West Bank, an action that killed hundreds and occurred within this story, goes unremarked. Similarly, much time is spent on Hamas torturing suspected informants, the practice that completed Yousef’s ideological transformation against his father’s organization, while the Isreali’s similar torture tactics, with the exception of a very light use against Yousef following his initial arrest, is untouched.Given that both the principals of the film worked over a decade to circumvent and weaken Hamas, these kinds of discrepancies are expected from them, and perhaps should be expected from a documentary that offers such an uncommonly intimate story of the regional struggle. However, Schirman does not resist the temptation, even subtly, to allegorize these two very particular individuals with unique experiences into representatives of their nationalities, and neither will many critics and viewers, to the detriment of their understanding of a very complex regional conflict. The Green Prince is a very powerful, intricate exploration of an intimate and compromising relationship. As the perspective of its two subjects and an espionage story, it is astounding, surprising, and incredibly tense. As a documentary, supposedly a documentation of world events, it is very troubling.
The story itself is astounding. In the height of the continuing war between Israel and Hamas, Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet, scores one of the biggest coups of its history – the recruitment of a man on the inside, Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a top Hamas spokesman, as an informant for Shin Bet, codenamed “The Green Prince.” The Green Prince, almost entirely through extended interviews with Yousef and his handler at Shin Bet, Gonen Ben Yitzhak, tells this story, the recruitment of Yousef, his rise in Hamas to a position of enormous power and influence, and the eventual collapse of the operation.Yousef is the main subject of the documentary, while Yitzhak serves as a very close second, the film developing over time as a portrayal of competing father figures, a conflict, unspoken and unknown, between Yitzhak and Yousef’s actual father, the latter of whom Yousef loves dearly and strives to protect but whose worldview he has radically departed. The Green Prince draws nearly all its material from Yousef and Yitzhak, complemented by news footage and judicious reenactment. As such, the film is a very intimate portrait of these two people and their relationship, but loses the wider regional, political, religious, and moral perspective that is crucial to understanding anything in the Middle East.Most film, especially documentary film, is a carefully crafted argument, meant to carry the viewer along a journey and deposit them, hopefully inevitably, at the understanding and acceptance of the film’s point of view. The Green Prince is especially so – both Yousef and Yitzhak, and, in fact, Nadav Schirman, the director, recognize this as an opportunity to effectively have their day in the court of popular opinion, and each argues eloquently for the justification or condemnation of the events portrayed, advancing an interpretation of these actions as favorable to their perspective as possible.Schirman, through the use of his only available but nonetheless the most basic and powerful of film techniques (editing, close-ups), gets to have the most definitive say, particularly as his choices frame their stories and shapes their method of delivery. Partially, Schirman’s most overt goal is to build a narrative arc in their relationship, which he accomplishes admirably. But, just as theirs is, his perspective is overtly political. Schirman himself characterized the relationship as hopeful, choosing the climax of his film as when Yitzhak puts himself potentially in harm’s way to protect Yousef. The interpretation that Yousef represents Palestine and Yitzhak Israel, that their story is indicative of a potential peace between their nationalities, is unavoidable.But it is also potentially dangerous. Neither Yousef nor Yitzhak, especially the latter, who speaks of torture, terrorism and assassination in a matter-of-fact tone, deal in representations. This is the story of their real life, with immediate and profound personal and political stakes. Opposite from critic Anthony Kaufman’s assertion that “if they can do it…other Israelis and Palestinians (can) get along,” Yousef particularly strives to position himself as a political scion navigating a complicated and treacherous moral ground as successfully as possible, with potentially deadly consequences. Yitzhak, however, at least in interview, seems unperturbed by moral questions when dealing with the active logistical problems of keeping Yousef happy, effective, and alive. For them both, the potential of a violent death, even now, is very real, and seems to make quaint the question, “why can’t they get along?” To the contrary, they are merely individuals struggling for survival in a vast global framework of competing ideologies, values, market goals, and political agendas, for any and all of which a man or woman can, have, and will strap a bomb to their chest and detonate it in a market square.Because only Schirman, Yousef and Yitzhak’s voices and perspectives are acknowledged, this network, the historical and political circumstances that at least factor into, if not override, our decisions, are downplayed and sometimes missed. This is especially troubling because it emphasizes Schirman’s perspective, which, as director, is already overwhelmingly powerful. Documentaries have the obvious and much-discussed drawback of being taken not as argument but as truth, an eventuality especially troubling when your subject is something as labyrinthine as current Middle Eastern politics.To wit: when Youself talks about his desire, as a youth to kill Israeli police and militants, the audience is treated to an extreme close up of his eyes, first looking away, then gazing directly, seemingly menacingly, into the camera. What was most likely an innocuous or potentially otherwise meaningful expression is here rendered as menace from a man who, even in years of working with the Hamas, has never been known to be personally violent, simply by virtue of angle, frame and juxtaposition. By contrast, when Yitzhak speaks later in the film euphemistically of assassinating a Hamas, his argument is presented not as the cold calculation of systematized political murder, or, as Yousef’s, expression of violent perspective and temperament, but instead as a practical solution to an immediate problem. Again, when Yousef realizes Hamas is fomenting hatred against Israel by staging missile strikes, this is treated as deplorable, which it is. However, Israel’s rain of actual missiles throughout the West Bank, an action that killed hundreds and occurred within this story, goes unremarked. Similarly, much time is spent on Hamas torturing suspected informants, the practice that completed Yousef’s ideological transformation against his father’s organization, while the Isreali’s similar torture tactics, with the exception of a very light use against Yousef following his initial arrest, is untouched.Given that both the principals of the film worked over a decade to circumvent and weaken Hamas, these kinds of discrepancies are expected from them, and perhaps should be expected from a documentary that offers such an uncommonly intimate story of the regional struggle. However, Schirman does not resist the temptation, even subtly, to allegorize these two very particular individuals with unique experiences into representatives of their nationalities, and neither will many critics and viewers, to the detriment of their understanding of a very complex regional conflict. The Green Prince is a very powerful, intricate exploration of an intimate and compromising relationship. As the perspective of its two subjects and an espionage story, it is astounding, surprising, and incredibly tense. As a documentary, supposedly a documentation of world events, it is very troubling.
