55 pages • 1 hour read
Mosab Hassan YousefSon of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Mohad Hassan Yousef
Yousef is a Palestinian American author and activist. He was born in Ramallah, a city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in 1978 and is the eldest son of Hassan Yousef, a respected local imam. During the First Intifada, his father became a co-founder of the militant group Hamas and spent much of Yousef’s childhood in and out of Israeli prisons. Yousef took part in protests against Israeli rule in his youth. In 1995, he was arrested by Israeli authorities on suspicion of being a major Hamas leader and was eventually offered to serve as a spy within Hamas for Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence organization. Yousef accepted this offer, and he served as an informant during the violent Second Intifada (2000-2005).
He used his role as the trusted son of a Hamas leader to help Israel better understand the organization and root out even more militant factions that grew from it. By his own account, he helped foil many terrorist bombings and bring to justice the perpetrators of other bombings. In 2007, Yousef ended his service with Shin Bet, moved to the United States, and publicly declared his conversion to Christianity. After the publication of Son of Hamas made him a public figure, he has become a prominent speaker, often visiting college campuses to denounce terrorism and praise Israel. He has courted controversy by making inflammatory statements about Islam and Arab culture, often building on implications from the book that Islam is the cause of Middle Eastern conflict and that it must be overcome for peace to prevail.
Hassan Yousef
Hassan is a well-known Palestinian leader and one of the founding members of Hamas, the Islamist political and militant group. Born in 1955 in the West Bank, Yousef became a prominent figure during the First Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule in the late 1980s. As an imam and respected religious leader, he played a key role in shaping Hamas's ideology, which centers on resisting Israeli occupation and establishing an Islamic state. Over the years, his involvement with the group has led to numerous arrests by Israeli authorities, and he has spent much of his life in and out of Israeli prisons.
In addition to his militant background, Hassan has served in the Palestinian Legislative Council, representing Hamas on the political stage. Although he is linked to the group’s violent activities, some view him as a more moderate voice within Hamas, as he has occasionally supported ceasefires or diplomatic solutions. However, his leadership role in an organization responsible for numerous attacks on Israel has made him a highly controversial figure internationally.
Hassan’s relationship with his eldest son, Mosab Hassan Yousef, came into the public eye when Mosab defected from Hamas and began working with Israeli intelligence. This created a deep personal and ideological rift between them, which became a central theme in Mosab’s memoir, Son of Hamas. While Hassan remained committed to Hamas and its cause, his son took a dramatically different path, collaborating with Israel in secret. Their story highlights the deep divisions that can emerge, even within families, over the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
Yasser Arafat
Arafat, a central figure in the Palestinian struggle for statehood, also plays a significant role in Son of Hamas, where his leadership and influence are depicted from Yousef’s perspective. As the longtime chairman of the PLO and a figure who oscillated between militancy and diplomacy, Arafat embodies the complex dynamics of Palestinian leadership that Yousef grapples with throughout the book.
In Son of Hamas, Arafat represents the older generation of Palestinian leaders who, despite participating in peace processes like the Oslo Accords, were often seen by some—including Yousef and others within Hamas—as failing to bring true liberation to the Palestinian people. Arafat’s approach contrasts with Hamas’s more hardline stance, which Yousef’s father, Hassan Yousef, co-founded. This divergence highlights the internal conflict within the Palestinian leadership between those like Arafat, who leaned toward political negotiation, and factions like Hamas, who continued to endorse armed resistance.
Yousef’s journey as described the book, especially as he began cooperating with Israeli intelligence, underscores how disillusionment with both Arafat’s compromises and Hamas’s extremism drove him to take a different path entirely. Arafat’s political maneuverings during pivotal moments in Palestinian history provide a backdrop to the personal and ideological conflicts that Yousef experienced, further illuminating the divided and volatile landscape that Yousef had to navigate.
