“Palestine depends on the destruction of Israel. If there is any definition of Palestine, it means the absence of Israel,” Mossab Hassan Yousef, otherwise known as the Green Prince, told Dr. Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Foreign Affairs at The Jerusalem Post Annual Conference on Tuesday.
Yousef is the son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef. A Palestinian ex-terrorist, he defected to Israel in 1997 and worked as a spy for the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) until he moved to the United States in 2007.
Yousef said that you have to ask: “What is Palestine? Is it an ethnic group? A religion? A distinct language? Do you have scripture? Are you a nation? Were you a country? None of that. So what is Palestine? What is the purpose of Palestine?” he rhetorically asked the audience at the conference.
He voiced his opposition to a two-state solution with a Palestinian state led by the Palestinian Authority. “For those representing a two-state solution, they either want Israel to cease to exist, or they are not aware of this existential threat,” he declared. In his opinion, the PA is an even greater threat than Hamas.
“All this global chaos is managed by the PA – by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). It’s not Hamas propaganda: It’s the ones who sit in Ramallah, who pay all the advocates worldwide through their embassies – those are the ones fighting against Israel and its legitimacy.”
Yousef said that it is too costly to institute a hostile Palestinian state. “You cannot give them Judea, Samaria, the mountains, the valley – this is a defense line,” he resolutely explained.
Yousef told the audience that the PA comes from the same terrorism as Hamas or any other group that originated from the Muslim Brotherhood.
He brought up Yasser Arafat, former chairman of the PLO, which later became the PA. “I was in his meeting when he gave my father the authority to blow up markets, buses, and beaches during the Second Intifada.”
A condemnation of the anti-Jewish ideology in Islam
At the beginning of the discussion, Yousef brought up the history of the “slaughter of Jews by the hands of Muslims for approximately 14 centuries.” He criticized the Jewish people for being in denial of that fact. “I understand why: If the Jewish people acknowledge this fact, they will have to confront a majority of Muslims.”
He told the audience that Muslims believe that Allah hates the Jewish people, and “why would you be against the belief of one you pray to five times a day?”
This is why there has been so much propaganda against the Jewish state across social media, he said. When people see it a thousand times a day, they start believing it.
“Hundreds of millions of people out there want us dead,” he told the audience.
“If we don’t fight Islam, the world is in danger,” the Green Prince warned. “We have a big problem; we need to wake up. And if we keep ignoring and denying the existential threat, we will have to face it when it is too late.”
At the end of the conversation, Yousef spoke of potential solutions to the conflict. He believes that “Arabs [should] rule Arabs.” He told the audience that maybe Arabs should be drafted to the IDF and be responsible for ruling over the West Bank. He also floated an idea of Egyptian and Jordanian intelligence looking over the Palestinians.
Yousef also believes that mandatory Holocaust education across the Arab world should be part of the solution, as well as teaching that “to be a victim and stay in victimhood is unacceptable.”
However, he believes that allowing the PA to rule over a Palestinian state would be the destruction of Israel. “You give them east Jerusalem tomorrow, and they will want West Jerusalem next. If you give them 1967 [borders], they will say they want the whole thing.”