His new life is different from anything he has known before. Twenty-seven years have passed since he was first arrested and served time in Israel. His life has had the kind of upheavals that make a Hollywood movie.
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At age 44, Mosab Hassan Yousef, who famously helped Israel thwart Hamas terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada by working as an informant for the Shin Bet security agency, is trying to heal the trauma of the past and break free of the labels he has been assigned over the years.
Until a few years ago, Yousef, who is known as the "Green Prince," was living the American dreams, with wealthy friends, luxury apartments, a Porsche, beach parties, and occasional drugs. Along the way, he turned his back on his religion and converted to Christianity.
After his first book "Son of Hamas," was published, as well as a documentary detailing his work for the Shin Bet, Yousef also became a sought-after lecturer in Europe and the United States. Thousands filled the events he would speak at, eager to hear what this special man had to say.
But depression and the pain of the past knew no cure in America, and at some point, Yousef decided to leave everything behind and travel far away, far enough to disconnect from his previous life and begin something new. Less internet, junk food, and pursuit of money. More Yoga, healthy food, seclusion, and introspection.
His bungalow, on an island in Southeast Asia, where he has lived for several years now, overlooks nature and the sea. It is precisely in this simple life that he managed to find what he had been lacking in the materialistic world of Los Angeles.
Yousef's espionage work was just a part of his story. For the average Palestinian, he is more than just a "traitor" who betrayed his people by working for the Shin Bet. Of course, this is a red line that cannot be foreign, but this is not the only one Yousef crossed.
While the West perceives him as a hero for helping Israel and opposing terrorism, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip the situation is the opposite.
For Palestinians, Yousef is a spy, a traitor, and an enemy of Islam. To this day, they have not forgotten what he did. Doubtful whether they ever will. Despite the decades that have passed, Ramallah does not forget the Palestinian informer who betrayed them.
To them, Yousef is a young Palestinian who turned his back on his culture and brought shame to the community, and Islam. In their view, he not only "sold" the Palestinian issue, from which there is no turning back, but also went against his family and community and denounced everything about Islam and the Arab culture.
The fact that precisely he, the son of Hamas co-founder Hassan Yousef, chose to "switch sides" and cross the Rubikon, turned him into a persona non grata among Palestinians.
While his peers chose to go to mosques and throw stones at Israeli soldiers, Yousef "built a career" in the Shin Bet. He proved his intelligence skills again and again by bringing Israeli operators incriminating information against Hamas, which would help the agency arrest terrorists and prevent attacks.
How a young Muslim man from Ramallah came to work for the enemy is a question Yousef continues to ask himself in his book, "My Journey to Freedom," now published in Hebrew by Kinneret, Zmora, Dvir publishing house. In it, he reveals the methods of the Shin Bet and describes the sophisticated ways in which he extracted information from terrorists to later share it with Israel as well as the constant worry that accompanied him lest he is arrested and tortured by Palestinian detainees for collaborating with Israel.
Yousef worked for Shin Bet for almost a decade, during which Israel sought to get its hands on one of the most wanted men, Hamas commander Ibrahim Hamed, who planned several suicide bombings in the early 2000s, in which dozens of Israelis were killed.
Of all the counter-terrorism operations I was involved with, I think this was the most significant one, Yousef writes in his book, as it led to the capture of Hamed and exposed the real leaders of Hamas in the West Bank, who planned and funded the killings.
My work with the Shin Bet included making sure that I have no blood on my hands, and that my father would be spared. He was hiding in the basement of a local residential building at the time. The Shin Bet knew where he was and ordered the IDF not to search that particular house. But you never know.
I try to calm my nerves and call my father. It rings. Rings again. Finally, he picks up, and says in his thick voice, "You will not believe it! The military searched every house on the block, except this one. Our prayers were answered, may Allah protect us."
After the affair was exposed, Hassan Yousef disowned his "rebellious" son. Later, Yousef's younger brother, Suheib , also left Hamas, blasting the "racist" terror group's corruption.
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At some point, Yousef decided that his time with the Shin Bet must come to an end. In his book, he explains that one of the reasons for this was because then-Shin Bet coordinator Gonen Ben Itzhak was replaced.
Something didn't click with the new coordinator, Yousef says in the book, and sometime later, he asked to "go on vacation," from which he never returned. He lived in the US for 10 years, with the threat of deportation hanging over his head.
And precisely when he received his American citizenship, and at a time when things seemed to be going well, Yousef decided the US was not the right place for him and set out on an adventure in the hopes of finding closure and freedom. Not complete freedom for a scarred soul like him, but as close to freedom as possible.
