Have you seen the parched man in the desert, its melting heat scorch-ing him at the hour of high noon, who falls upon the sweet brook and drinks and drinks and still can scarcely quench his thirst?? That is a picture of the daughter of my country and her thirst for learning... And have you passed a palace of towering summits, lights glittering within, and around it dozens of the hungry, each awaiting his portion, until, when the door is shut and the lights are put out, they go back the way they came with a silent sorrow upon their faces?? That is a scene to be witnessed at the gates of Palestine's government schools at the start of every school year.

Yesterday I passed in front of the Education Department school in the city, and there were dozens of mothers, each holding her little daughter by the hand and turning back the way she had come. I approached one of them and asked her the reason, and she answered: "There is no place for her at the school — the same answer I heard last year when I registered her name..." I asked her, "And what will you do with her?" She said: "I will put her into one of the private schools." She swallowed a lump in her throat and added: "And pay a monthly fee for her..."

Do not ask, after that, how one who pays the tax for education can be denied education?? And do not ask where the crushing taxes paid by the Arab taxpayer go — chief among them a supplementary education tax!... The answer lies with the sum allotted to education, which in 1924 was six percent of the general budget and by 1945 had become three and a half percent of that budget... And the answer lies with the security administration, which swallows what it swallows in this country afflicted by so black a misfor-

tune... this country which for twenty-seven years has remained a bleeding wound, repeating with the poet:

Ask me not about my wounds: for whenever I dress one wound, another flows.

And beware of asking how it is that the Jews, our neighbors, are permitted to take charge of their own education, so that it has room for every boy and girl, and they can give ten thousand students a secondary education, while we, the majority, have but a thousand students receiving sec-ondary schooling?... And beware of asking, likewise, how it is permitted them to draw up their curricula for themselves, making of every boy and girl student a rebellious creature with designs upon Arab Palestine, while the

Arabs are forbidden anything but to march according to the pro-grams laid down for them by the Mandatory government?... Beware of asking how and why — for that is equality in the twentieth century... and that is the justice for which the great, poor peoples fought, to secure it for us, we the small peoples, so thankless, so ungrateful for the blessing!...

And if I have spoken to you of this overcrowding and this injus-tice, I beg you not to suppose that the people bear it in patient res-ignation, content to let the oppor-tunity slip from their hands... Private schools are opening in every town and village... and the demand for them is without paral-lel — a demand that drives even the toiling, laboring class to cut a morsel from their children's food

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