Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 85
this situation goes unchanged is very bad policy and, as all bad policies do, it will come
back to haunt us. A personal anecdote I witnessed serves to illustrate my point.
In the early 1960s, David Amad was a classmate of mine in undergraduate engineering
school at Texas A&M. As a teenager he had been adopted by a Baptist missionary
couple in Palestine and moved to Texas at the end of their mission. His blood father,
mother and some siblings had been killed in one of the many terror-inducing
confrontations with Israeli hooligans. He was left with nothing and lived on the streets,
by his wits, until he was mercifully adopted. David would cry every time he talked to me
about his bad fortune and sufferings. After graduation David went to work for Harry
Bovay, owner of a large consulting engineering firm in Houston, Texas.
A few years later I was running my own consulting engineering firm in Bolivia and
needed technical support in David’s specialty. I contracted with Bovay Engineering for
David’s services and he went to Bolivia to work for me on temporary duty. My
recollection of the many heart to heart conversations I had with David does not include
any expressions of hatred or bottled-up desires for bloody revenge, although the love
for his homeland was intense. Years later he became a successful Houston
restaurateur and accumulated a good bit of money, which he used to move back to
Amman, Jordan, in pursuit of his dream to help his people. A dream such as his could
only be achieved in America, and he knew it. This is another example of a freedom
fighter who does not have to blow innocent people up to fight for freedom and of how
our government could be so influential in helping solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
In the aftermath of World War II, the allied victors endorsed the creation of the State of
Israel, an undertaking that at the time offered the most attractive solutions to the plight
of displaced European Jewish people and served best the domestic purposes of the
Anglo-European political leadership. The return of the Jewish nation to their ancestral
home was a good idea; the Zionist movement had started it toward the end of the 19 th
Century. And though its socialist bent championed collective farms called kibutz, they
paid for the land they bought.
Immediately after the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, the new immigrants began
to push its borders by armed and other violent means; no longer by contractual
acquisition of legal titles as the earlier Zionist settlers had done under the rule of the
Ottoman Empire. Armed resistance was reduced by bribing the established monarchies
of the region and by intimidation with the lurking danger of the communist menace to
make the bribe justifiable. Insightful witnesses of these events attribute the failure of
unified Arab opposition in all the wars surrounding this conflict to these causes.
When Menachem Begin and his military commander Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon on
June 6, 1982, inflicting upon Beirut’s citizens some of the most inhuman shelling since
World War II, they justified their action on the grounds that they were pursuing terrorists.
Mr. Begin glossed over the fact that 25 years earlier he had been classified as a terrorist
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