| "Say, nice place you got here!" "Thanks, we've been fixing it up lately. New gun cabinets, new ammo lockers. And we opened up the kitchen into the meeting room so we can cook and talk at the same time. A little paint and fresh linens and we...what are you doing with that measuring tape?" "Oh, we've got an old armoire that would look fabulous over in the corner by the entertainment center. Mahmoud will drop it by tomorrow." |
Islamic Jihad on Tuesday attended a high-level meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization for the first time, as part of President Mahmoud Abbas' efforts to coax militants to join his mainstream group. But the militant group Hamas stayed away and Abbas gave no indication how he could reconcile the Islamic militants' declared dedication to Israel's destruction with the PLO's stated support for peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state. "Definitely, there is a possibility that we can reach an agreement on basic political common denominators," Abbas told reporters after a meeting of his PLO Executive Committee attended by senior Islamic Jihad leader Mohammed al-Hindi.Abbas' efforts appeared to represent an attempt to bring Hamas and Islamic Jihad into the political mainstream to help his peace efforts with Israel. Israel, however, has called on Abbas to dismantle militant groups rather than embrace them. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, opposed to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, hold to a vision of an Islamic state incorporating what is now Israel.
Talks on whether the two factions would join the PLO kicked off last month in Cairo, where militants agreed to extend until the end of the year a de facto cease-fire with Israel. But after the meeting in Gaza, Hindi said "a long time and much effort" was needed before Islamic factions could agree to membership in the PLO, now led by Abbas following Yasser Arafat's death. The PLO, an umbrella group of secular factions, is the Palestinians' main policy-making body.