Haaretz exclusive: Hamas founder's son worked for Shin Bet for years

The son of a leading Hamas figure, who famously converted to Christianity, served for over a decade as the Shin Bet security service's most valuable source in the militant organization's leadership, Haaretz has learned.

Mosab Hassan Yousef is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a Hamas founder and one of its leaders in the West Bank. The intelligence he supplied Israel led to the exposure of a number of terrorist cells, and to the prevention of dozens of suicide bombings and assassination attempts on Israeli figures.

The exclusive story will appear in this Friday's Haaretz Magazine, and Yousef's memoir, "Son of Hamas" (written with Ron Brackin) will be released next week in the United States. Yousef, 32, became a devout Christian 10 years ago and now lives in California after fleeing the West Bank in 2007 and going public with his conversion.

Yousef was considered the Shin Bet's most reliable source in the Hamas leadership, earning himself the nickname "the Green Prince" - using the color of the Islamist group's flag, and "prince" because of his pedigree as the son of one of the movement's founders.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1151941.html

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Seems contradictory in fact.

The paragraph you cited indicated a time 30 years ago or so when Israel supposedly assisted Hamas in its early days as a counterweight to the PLO.

but you're not cynical enough.

Perhaps that helps clear up some of your confusion about the time frame of Hamas.

1987 — The establishment of Hamas
The acronym "Hamas" first appeared in 1987 in a leaflet that accused the Israeli intelligence services of undermining the moral fiber of Palestinian youth as part of Mossad's recruitment of what Hamas termed "collaborators".

1991 — The Persian Gulf war
Between February and April 1988, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin raised several millions dollars from the Gulf states.. In prison since 1989, Yassin was released under “humanitarian reasons” by Prime Minister Netanyahu following a failed assassination attempt on Khaled Mashal, and expelled to Jordan, from where he was allowed to return to Gaza in October 1997. The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military branch, was created a year before the Oslo Accords, in an attempt to block those negotiations.

There are some web sites that are better than Wikipedia that you ought to consider checking out.

Here's an interview from Democracy Now that may be helpful:

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. How was Hamas established?

ROBERT DREYFUSS: Well, gosh, you know, you can go back, really 60 or 70 years. The Hamas organization is an outgrowth, really a formal outgrowth, of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was a transnational organization founded in Egypt, which established branches in the ’30s and ’40s in Jordan and Palestine and Syria and elsewhere. And the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood was founded by a man named Said Ramadan, actually the father of Tariq Ramadan, who you mentioned earlier. Said Ramadan was one of the founders of the Brotherhood, who was the son-in-law of its originator, Hassan al-Banna, and he established the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan and in Jerusalem in 1945. And it grew rapidly during the ’40s and was, not surprisingly, a very conservative political Islamic Movement that had a lot of support from the Hashemite royal family of Jordan and from the king of Egypt

http://www.democracynow.org/2006/1/26/how_israel_and_the_united_states

The rest of the interview should provide some useful information.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a VERY NASTY group that Egypt tries to control and subjugate.

It's this brotherhood from which the Grand Mufti al-Hussayni came from, and they're an Islamist group that had clear ties to fascist Germany of the 1930's and 1940's and their Nazi ideology, specifically WRT the treatment of Jews.
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/21591482/The-Muslim-Brotherhood-Nazis-and-Al-Qaeda-transcript-of-a-speech

"Hamas cannot make peace with the Israelis. That is against what their God tells them. It is impossible to make peace with infidels, only a cease-fire, and no one knows that better than I. The Hamas leadership is responsible for the killing of Palestinians, not Israelis," he said. "Palestinians! They do not hesitate to massacre people in a mosque or to throw people from the 15th or 17th floor of a building, as they did during the coup in Gaza. The Israelis would never do such things. I tell you with certainty that the Israelis care about the Palestinians far more than the Hamas or Fatah leadership does."

Mosab Hassan Yousef is a best-selling author who wrote "Son of Hamas" about his life as a Palestinian who became an informant for Israeli intelligence. He's probably near the top of every Islamist terror hit list, yet, incredibly enough, the U.S. may soon deport him as a terror threat.

In 2007, Mr. Yousef came to the United States, where he converted to Christianity from Islam and applied for political asylum. The request was denied in February 2009, Mr. Yousef says, on grounds that he was potentially "a danger to the security of the United States" and had "engaged in terrorist activity." His case has automatically proceeded to the deportation stage, and on June 30 at 8 a.m. he will appear before Judge Rico Bartolomei in Homeland Security Immigration Court in San Diego.

more...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703561604575282412942302170.html?mod=rss_opinion_main

Israel or Gaza or first Israel and then Gaza? He is no longer of any possible value to Israel now is he?

and even provided funding for its development during and after the first Intifada. The prevailing theory as to why Israel would fund a Palestinian group is that it wished to counter the PLO, as Arafat was beginning to talk peace, and had earlier accepted Israel's right to exist. With the colonialism of the Palestinian territories far from completed, talk of a Palestinian state was not desired. I'm not certain of this point, but I believe Sheikh Hassan Yousef was released from prison for this reason, to lead Hamas.

Today we are seeing the effects of this development, a political division among the Palestinians. Although both Fatah and Hamas had militant branches, only Hamas went on to be characterized as a "terrorist" group, while both Fatah and Israel escaped such labeling.

During the time you speak of, in the early days before Hamas was officially formed in 1987, they were not a terrorist organization and concerned themselves exclusively with the building of mosques and social institutions.

At the same time the PLO was also very different from its current incarnation. I'm sure I need not remind you of the school bus massacre, plane hijacking, and other attacks against civilians that the PLO orchestrated during that time frame.

Of course, much has changed since them for both groups and Israel's perception of both groups has been adjusted accordingly.

And no they have not changed. They still have a militant sector that fights again the occupation and colonialism, and they still fund schools and medical clinics in Gaza, their base. Per the last assessment of political membership, only about 25% of Gazan Palestinians are Hamas supporters, while 18% of West Bank residents are supporters of Hamas. Keep in mind that until 2005, Gaza was also being colonized by Israel and it had a number of Israeli settlements.

Hamas is at least partly an intentional creation of Israel that dates back to the 1970s.

Back then the secular Palestine Liberation Organization was waging a terror campaign against Israel, which it vowed to destroy. There was no contact between Israel and the PLO, at least not officially. But Israel looked for Palestinians who didn’t align themselves with the PLO. It found them, in Gaza, in an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood—deeply pious Palestinians who were opposed to the PLO’s secular outlook, and who had adopted the Brotherhood’s motto: “Islam is the solution. The Koran is our constitution.”

<snip>

When Hamas Turned Violent

Yassin’s group renamed itself Hamas at the beginning of the first Palestinian intifada, in 1987. A year later Hamas published its charter, which calls, in part, for wiping out Israel. Israel initially ignored the charter and continued to talk with Hamas militants—until 1989, when Hamas launched its first direct attack on Israeli soldiers.

By 2004, when Hamas had embraced suicide bombings as a tactic, Israel reverted to an old tactic of its own: assassinations. An Israeli helicopter killed Yassin as he was leaving a prayer service. His bodyguards and nine civilian bystanders were also killed. A few weeks later, an Israeli gunship fired a missile at the car that was carrying Yassin’s successor, Abdel Aziz Rantis, killing him, his bodyguards and his son.

It was then that Khaled Mashaal, whom Israel had tried to assassinate years earlier, took over Hamas, directing its political operations from Damascus.

http://middleeast.about.com/od/israelandpalestine/a/me090126.htm

Israel's involement with Hamas was most prominent in the 1970s, before they were even called Hamas. By 1987, when they became "official" things had changed dramatically.

Hamas is Hamas, which you suggest was something else without a name.

Hamas was no different than the PLO turned Fatah during the second Intifada. There was also another independent group which fought Israel's occupation and colonization, which did not stop in spite of ongoing Intifada. In other words there were several groups fighting the occupation, not just Hamas. You claim some change in Hamas, but it was not a change that somehow missed the other groups. Singling out Hamas was a decision made for propaganda purposes.

What it did do was to help Israel circumvent the charge of being a terrorist state, given the numerous civilians, families and children, killed, which was accomplished with slick propaganda.

Learn about it here: Peace, Propaganda, and The Promised Land.

Part I:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCL6WdnuNp4

Part II:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo2HW4T7wK4

If that is your claim then you have provided no evidence to support it.

There is evidence that indicates support by Israel in the 1970s of what eventually became Hamas, but you seem to be discounting that for some reason.

1987 and beyond is the time period in question. But what does it matter. Israel is going ahead helter skelter with the occupation and colonization, and pretty much this old stuff doesn't matter. Whether it is Hamas or Fatah, both of them consider the colonization of Palestinian lands illegal, and continue to fight it.

If you can find any citation that describes any other time when Israel provided assistance and support to Hamas, please provide it.

It was created as a foil to the secular nationalist (at times verging on socialist) PLO.

into whether there are back-channel connections between Hamas and Likud. Each of them, repeatedly, has made choices that, somehow, just HAPPENED to serve the political interests of the other.

Likud owes at least two election victories to Hamas bombings during the election campaigns.

Hamas owes its breakthrough, at least in part, to Likud's insistence on isolating and humiliating Arafat in his compound at Ramallah.

Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a co-founder of Hamas, has won his bid for political asylum in the United States, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Yousef, a Christian convert, is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, one of the most prominent Hamas figures in the West Bank. Yousef says he was an Israeli spy for a decade in a recently released autobiography, “Son of Hamas.”

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/01/son-of-hamas-gets-political-asylum/