'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Meshaal interview transcript

I have now finished transcribing the recording I made of my June 4 interview with Hamas head Khaled Meshaal, and am happy to make it available here.

I just compared what I have in the transcript with the news report and analysis of the interview that I published with my esteemed friends at IPS on June 5. Actually, looking back at that, I think I did a pretty good job (with the help of the two sets of notes taken during the interview by myself and Bill the spouse) of capturing-- and providing background explanations for-- the major points in the interview.

So why bother with producing a transcript, you might ask? (And I did ask, given that I hate transcribing from audio. Plus, the quality of this audio wasn't too great. Memo to self: next time take an actual mic. Apple MacBook mics might be good but they ain't that good.)

One reason I do it is that I am a root-and-branch empiricist. By working so closely with the audio I got a much better sense of many aspects of the interview that I'd forgotten about, including details about his rhetorical and inter-personal style and some significant points of substance.

For example, I think it was important to be reminded of the concern he expressed about US actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Also, in this exchange,
Q: If you had the Palestinian state in the whole of the territories occupied in 1967, would that be the end of the conflict?

A: This is what we’re demanding today. After our people has liberated itself and has established its independent state, it’s the state that afterwards will decide its position.
I think neither Bill nor I had taken down the important point that he said it was the Palestinian state that would decide whether its own establishment had terminated the conflict. In the IPS version, I had it as the "Palestinian people."

Also, in general, I think it's worthwhile to make this transcript, like the one of my January 2008 interview with Meshaal, available as service to the public.

There is a lot more commentary I can do on this latest transcript. Including, I'd like to make some comparisons between this one and the last one, and with the other documented interviews Meshaal has given over the past couple of years.

My quick bottom line on the interview as a whole is that it aptly illustrates the truth of the capsule judgment made in this recent paper from USIP: "Hamas: Ideological rigidity and political flexibility". (Btw, USIP put up a whole new website this week, so the link I gave earlier for this important paper doesn't work. This one does, I think.)

On the "political flexibility" front, in the interview I was really trying to probe the decisionmaking that went into Hamas's crucial 2005 decision to participate in the PA parliamentary election of 2006... and I got a little way forward with that.

But I still have a bunch of follow-up questions I would really like to ask Meshaal!!

Anyway, I have a piece that I'll be doing for the CSM next week on Hamas, and some other good Hamas-related assignments coming up. So all my work on the transcribing will not go to waste...