Speech #870164216

Then came tragedy. Musa bey and his young intellectuals came on the stage too late and with too many odds against them to save Palestine from the debacle of partition and war. When the holocaust was over. more than a million Palestinian Arabs were refugees. their homes gone. the lands from which their forebears had garnered a living for thousands of years turned over to other refugees about whose fate the world was more concerned. While America and Britain poured In dollars by the hundreds of millions to support and build new homes and a new life for those who supplanted them. the Arab refugees were. and remain in large part. kept alive by a 7penniesperpersonperday United Nations relief fund. And they were the luckier ones. for tens of thousands of frontier villagers had lost their lands or businesses. yet could not qualify as refugees because they still dwelt in their old homes. Palestine. in many Wayseduactionally. culturally. economicallythe flower of the Arab nation. had perished one fall afternoon in faraway Lake Success. and at the hands of its traditional friends. its land divided. the majority of its people homeless and destitute. Musa bey Alami was among the homeless.