Despite Attacks Orchestrated by Israel Lobby, Pro-Palestinian Candidate Gets 40 Percent in R.I. Primary

By Richard H. Curtiss

Rod Driver is a 66-year-old mathematics professor recently retired from the University of Rhode Island who campaigned for Congress by telling the people of his state about the persecution of the Palestinians.

As a result of intense organized opposition by Republican Party leaders, under pressure from the Israeli lobby, Driver lost. Nevertheless, he received 40 percent of the vote in the Republican primary election on Sept. 15. “There’s no prize for second place,” said Driver, “but considering the nature of the opposition, 40 percent was a lot more than most people expected.”

When I asked him earlier this year whether he considered himself primarily a candidate for Congress or primarily a peace and human rights activist using the television access to which candidates are entitled to tell the people of Rhode Island about the plight of the Palestinians, he hesitated for only a moment.

“The motivating force behind my involvement in politics for 48 years was always my interest in peace and human rights,” he answered. “I spent eight years as an elected representative in the Rhode Island legislature tackling many issues which had little to do with peace or human rights. But today it is the fact that I am a duly-qualified congressional candidate that enables me to place television ads telling about outrageous abuses of human rights which are being sponsored by the American taxpayers.”

After he filed for Congress in 1998 and put on the air a dramatic ad showing the abuse of a Palestinian family, he was called a bigot and an advocate of terrorism.

Such attempts to frighten him into silence with unfounded slanders, unfortunately, have many precedents. But his reaction to them was unusual, and might well become a model for other Americans frustrated at the unwillingness of the mainstream media to tell the true story of Israeli violations of international law. He just kept going.

Although Driver was born in England, his father was an American. His family departed England for Minneapolis on May 8, 1945, the day World War II ended in Europe. Driver earned a B.S. in electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota in 1953 and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1960. He spent a year at the Research Institute for Advanced Study in Baltimore, a year at the Mathematics Research Center in Madison, Wisconsin, and six years at the Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque before joining the faculty of the University of Rhode island in 1969. He also served from 1987 to 1994 as an elected member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives.

Even as a student, Driver had become a peace activist. In a lengthy article he wrote for the July-August 1998 issue of The Link*, a bi-monthly published in New York City by Americans for Middle East Understanding, Driver wrote that “in the early 1960s I was unaware of what my country was doing in Vietnam...I thought my friends had gone overboard in their animosity toward our government...I even believed Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 Tonkin Gulf tale at first.

“It was President Johnson’s shameless invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 that led me to question other aspects of our foreign activities…During the wars in Southeast Asia and in Latin America, I wrote hundreds of letters to newspapers and produced and distributed several pamphlets. A major effort, ‘Misinformation about Vietnam,’ was entered into the Congressional Record by Senator Mark Hatfield.

“The U.S. wars and interventions in Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Middle East had one particular troubling aspect in common. I was paying for them. Among all the bad things happening in the world, I am most troubled by the ones I am sponsoring through my tax dollars.”

Driver did a number of other things that helped prepare him for the toughest fight of his life. In the 1970s, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he won a court case against the CIA for opening his mail. In the Rhode Island House of Representatives he exposed a number of what he called “disreputable practices” of the state legislature. In 1996 he turned to the courts to stop the state Lottery Commission from introducing a new type of gambling without voter approval, a campaign in which Rhode Island’s governor later joined him.

In January 1997, however, he visited the West Bank. “My wife and I met Palestinians who had been shot, beaten or interrogated by the Israelis,” he wrote. “One victim was a two-year-old boy beaten by an Israeli soldier. We visited Palestinians whose homes had been demolished or stolen; and we happened to be there and stood helplessly alongside members of one family as an Israeli bulldozer uprooted their olive trees and took more of their land.”

After that, several of Driver’s commentaries on the Palestinians were published in newspapers in his state. As he has written, “I have to believe that the horrors being inflicted on human beings in Palestine would not continue if the American people, who pay Israel’s bills, learned of them.”

But he had much more to say on the subject than the newspapers had space to print. So, in mid-1997, he tried to place at his own expense an advertisement in The Providence Journal, Rhode Island’s largest newspaper, describing Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in the West Bank town of Bir Naballa. The surprise came when the newspaper declined to print the advertisement, which the newspaper’s lawyer described as “unacceptable.”

Refusing to take no for an answer, Driver then prepared a new advertisement consisting of a statement from the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem calling upon the Israeli government either to try or release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners being held indefinitely without trial. The statement already had appeared in a major Israeli newspaper. Again the Providence Journal’s lawyer refused to accept it. After a discussion, however, the newspaper’s executive editor agreed to print the ad provided it was set in a different type face than that used by the newspaper and marked off with a border and the word “advertisement” several times across the top.

When the advertisement was accepted, Driver signed a contract with the newspaper to spend a total of $10,000 on ads within a year. This gave him a better rate per column inch. Describing why he was motivated to spend such a large amount of his own money, Driver wrote:

“Ten thousand dollars may sound like a lot. But to put it into perspective, it is a little more than what I was annually putting into a voluntary retirement plan. And how does it compare with the life savings lost, the dreams shattered and the anguish inflicted on just one Palestinian whose home is demolished, whose land is confiscated or whose father, mother, husband, wife, brother, sister, son or daughter is killed, crippled or imprisoned?”

The newspaper published a column by the president of the Jewish Federation of Rhode Island attacking the paper for printing one of Driver’s ads and saying “we rely on gatekeepers—newspapers and magazines, broadcasters and analysts, friends and academics—to help select our information for us.”

To ensure that the Journal did not succumb to such self-censorship, Driver by-passed the advertising representative and took documentation for his advertisement on Shabak torture from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department directly to the newspaper’s vice president for advertising.

Driver put his name, address and phone number prominently in each ad. So, in addition to telephone calls and letters of support, he has received a number of anonymous calls and letters, some calling him an anti-Semite. One Christian fundamentalist even argued that the suffering inflicted on the Palestinians was punishment from God.

From Print to TV

Deciding that not enough people in Rhode Island were being exposed to his newspaper advertisements, which by now have totaled six different texts, Driver then sought to place on television an advertisement using Reuters film of Israeli police and soldiers removing a family from its home in East Jerusalem, shooting and arresting neighbors who tried to help the family, and then bulldozing the home.

The television station said it wouldn’t accept the advertisement. When asked why, the station responded that “we’re not required to give a reason.”

Aware that under federal law a bona fide political candidate can buy advertising time on television, and a station cannot reject the ads unless it rejects ads from all candidates in the contest in question, Driver then filed papers with the Federal Election Commission to become a candidate for the Republican nomination for Congress in Rhode Island’s second district.

Driver, who had spent $1,000 editing the television commercial, then spent another $14,000 to buy advertising time on various television stations. This prompted one station to explain on its evening news program why it was forced, under federal law, to run the commercial. It also ran a statement from B’nai B’rith’s Anti Defamation League urging viewers “to take a critical eye to [Driver’s] propaganda.” However, the controversy attracted more interest in the ads.

The TV stations and Reuters in Jerusalem, from which Driver had obtained the video footage, were getting critical calls, while Driver now was getting calls from people who said they were shocked to learn for the first time about what the Israelis were doing.

Then the Republican party began a series of unprecedented moves to defeat a Republican candidate.

On June 9 the Westerly Sun, a newspaper serving southern Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut, printed a press release from Chairwoman Joan Quick of the Rhode Island Republican Party declaring that Driver’s TV advertisement “offends millions of Jewish American, in its pro-terrorist portrayal of ongoing conflict in the Middle East between Palestinian terrorists and the State of Israel.”

When Driver contacted her to ask where she got the idea that the people depicted in the ad were terrorists, Ms. Quick said she got the wording for the press release from the national Republican Party. Driver countered with a release of his own, portions of which were printed in the same newspaper. Meanwhile, at the Republican state convention on June 24, an unannounced change in the written rules was invoked to prevent Driver from speaking.

After that, Driver’s campaign received wider coverage, both positive and negative, in local newspapers and on radio shows. Some of it involved unfair attacks from the Israeli consul general and local politicians and columnists. But it also resulted in Driver obtaining twice the 500 signatures from people in his district needed to run in the Republican primary election.

Republican Party leaders denied Driver the opportunity to visit most of the city and town Republican committees, even refusing to tell him when Republican events were being held. And a few days before the Sept. 15 primary they sent a letter to Republican voters listing the state’s top Republicans as endorsing Driver’s opponent. The list included Governor Lincoln Almond, Senator John Chafee, the lieutenant governor, the mayors of the two major cities in the district and the Republican leaders in the R.I. Senate and House. “I had worked with and supported most of these people during and after my days in the R.I. legislature,” said Driver.

Commenting on the results of the election, Driver said that “out of a population of half a million, the total vote in the Republican primary was a pitiful 6,426. A big surprise and disappointment was that, except for a handful, the 5,000 Arab Americans in Rhode Island did not participate in the election. And we lost by only 1,284 votes. Most of the Arab Americans in Rhode Island have not even registered to vote.”

Nevertheless, history was made since few candidates anywhere have focused their campaign on the misuse of U.S. tax dollars to support Israeli suppression of human rights.

Most candidates who are charged with not being sufficiently supportive of Israel run for cover, shifting the focus of their campaigns as far away from Middle East issues as possible. By contrast, Driver’s campaign refused to back down from reporting stories about what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians—stories which American voters hadn’t heard from the media. Driver’s second TV commercial was about the Atrash family in Palestine whose home has been bulldozed three times.

“We must continue, through letters to newspapers and other means, to tell Americans some of the stories about abuse of the Palestinians which are unknown to the public,” says Driver. “I have no intention of being silent.”

Driver’s campaign collected far less than he spent on his advertisements. Persons wishing to help pay off the debt can send contributions to Friends of Rod Driver, P.O. Box 156, West Kingston, RI, 02892, or they can telephone him at (401) 539-7985.

*Available from AMEU, Room 245, 475 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10115.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.