Arab Regimes and the Palestine Problem. I always tell this story. It is so symptomatic. "...and Musa Alami, having sized up the local situation, set off in February 1948 on a tour of the Arab capitals in order to discover how much help the brethren were really likely to give...His first stop, in Damascus, gave him a foretaste of what he was to find everywhere. 'I am happy to tell you', the Syrian president assured him, "that our Army and its equipment are of the highest order and well able to deal with a few Jews; and I can tell you in confidence that we even have an atomic bomb'; and seeing Musa's expression of incredulity, he went on, 'Yes, it was made locally; we fortunately found a very clever fellow, a tinsmith...." (Sir Geoffrey Furlonge, Palestine is My Country: The Story of Musa Alami, (NY: Praeger, 1969), p. 152.