Greg Abbott thinks he’s protecting Israel. But he’s a hypocrite on antisemitism | Opinion
What could you do with an extra $4.4 million? Two lawmakers from a small Texas city tried to find out.
San Marcos City Council members Alyssa Garza and Amanda Rodriguez cited an estimate that millions of dollars from city residents’ taxes contributed to a foreign country’s conflict. Money they noted should be used to improve transit, support education, supplement housing and healthcare initiatives with a direct benefit to their constituents. So, Garza and Rodriguez drafted a resolution — meaning, a gesture without immediate material impact but carrying symbolic weight for representing the city’s commitments and values — calling for, among many things, San Marcos to seek to end its indirect participation in a foreign war.
Simple enough? Despite a reported chorus of support during public comment, the resolution vote failed, 7-2, largely influenced by Gov. Greg Abbott threatening the city with a complete removal of state funding if it passed.
I’m chomping on my tongue through the muscle to underline the absurdity of meddling in what is, at least partially, a small government business decision, but none of the facts withheld flatter him.
The foreign country was Israel, which has killed, officially, about 50,000 Palestinians in its military response to Hamas’ killing of 1200 people on October 7, 2023. (According to The Lancet, Israel’s concurrent destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure and access to food, water and electricity makes the death toll substantially higher.)
That $4.4 million from San Marcos? Just a prick’s worth of the United States’ $18 billion bloodbath. None of Israel’s ongoing war would be possible without our politicians funding its weaponry. (If you’re counting, Fort Worth residents contributed about $54.7 million to the cause.)
Garza and Rodriguez called for a permanent ceasefire to a conflict that can rightly be called a genocide, funded through American pocketbooks. Though Abbott made almost the exact same financial argument about our funding of Ukraine in its war against Russia, he accused the council members of “antisemitism” and proposing a “pro-Hamas resolution.”
“I have repeatedly made clear that Texas will not tolerate antisemitism,” Abbott wrote in his letter to San Marcos Mayor Jane Hughson in his successful effort to thwart the city’s efforts. “Anti-Israel policies are anti-Texas policies.”
Abbott doesn’t care that the city’s resolution explicitly condemns antisemitism. The resolution also called for Hamas — and, critically, Israel — to safely return its hostages. Garza and Rodriguez could not be more clear that their disapproval of Israel’s actions were not a referendum on Jewish people.
None of the councilpersons’ attempts to stand up for Jewish life and dignity matter to Abbott. Either like Israel just as much as he does — a standard many Jews, especially the ones leading anti-war protests across the country, could not meet — or risk his regime pulling taxes from your town, essential allotments touching everything from roads, schools, even first responders.
Did a Republican governor threaten to defund the police? Stay woke!
Securing a permanent ceasefire is the utmost moral imperative, passingly analogous in its brutality to Vietnam for my parents’ generation. Since my peers came of age in post-9/11 America, we don’t even need to reach that far back; we have our own catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to lament.
Millennials are particularly over it, but we aren’t alone in running afoul of our governor’s needle-width standard of human rights. Recent polling from Data for Progress shows that roughly seven out of 10 likely American voters, with majorities across party want an end to this war.
By Abbott’s standard, many, if not most, of us are bigots. Better than arguing is asking yourself why anyone cares what he has to say about it.
I have personally spent 19 months performing the same ritualized throat clearing about why I oppose children getting blown up. Readers, I am tired. But Abbott depends on creating a discourse that forces you to defend your sympathy and ultimately humanity. His whole scheme falls apart the moment you realize your lying eyes haven’t deceived you.
“We’ve witnessed in real time the methods of collective punishment the state is willing to use to force the city to bend the knee,” Rodriguez said before the ultimate vote. “Not because of violence, not because of lawlessness, but because of speech they disagree with.” I commend her for rejecting the governor’s manipulative and unconstitutional terms of debate.
There is not a single minority group without a legitimate claim that Abbott has tried or succeeded at discriminating against them. While the Olympics removing prior restrictions for trans athletes, Abbott bans them from college sports He bullies state schools for sending faculty to conferences trying to diversify high education. He pardoned a man convicted of murdering a protestor at a Black Lives Matter rally. Muslim Texans can’t build an apartment complex without Abbott accusing them of subverting the government with a shadow theocracy.
Women in Texas can’t make reproductive decisions, and one man’s choice cost her life, and hers, and also hers. Even the disability rights community, which some might expect their physically disabled governor to vigorously fight for them can point to his utter contempt: vetoing a bill that would have allowed more disabled people to vote by mail.
But Abbott demands we define ethnic or religious bias by your loyalty to Israel. Everything else is woke. Or not woke enough?
Abbott stacks the deck against Texans freely discerning antisemitism through how he manages Texas’ Holocaust, Genocide and Antisemitism Advisory Committee, which he established in 2021. The group claims to “combat and confront hatred, prejudice, and indifference by educating all Texans about the Holocaust and other genocides.” How can they expect to fulfill that mission as its founder punishes Texans who acknowledge the genocide right in front of us?
The committee’s inherent contradictions undermine the importance of every Texan receiving a robust Holocaust education, one that doesn’t freeze our understanding in the past but applies to present injustices. And that’s entirely by Abbott’s design.
In 2022, the governor appointed Sarah Hagee Parker, chairwoman of the Christians United for Israel (CUFI) Action Fund and daughter of infamous televangelist John Hagee, as the group’s vice chair. Parker’s dad, who founded CUFI, once preached that “God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land.” (Hagee apologized for his theological endorsement of the Holocaust after it threatened to derail John McCain’s 2008 presidential run.) In another sermon, Hagee predicted the “anti Christ” would be a partially Jewish gay man and compared the apocryphal villain’s lineage to Hagee’s favorite prophet, Hitler.
The only place Hagee’s flagrantly antisemitic and conspiratorial pulpit belongs is a present-day Kanye West song. And yet, there’s Sarah, flattering the governor while lobbying for her insane father’s organization. Can you imagine how Abbott would respond to anyone else, especially an Arab or Muslim person, even loosely associated with something so vile? We don’t have to speculate. Two days after the October 7 attack, Abbott ordered a complete boycott on goods produced or exported from Gaza.
Nobody should tolerate an elected official inviting extremists like CUFI a platform. Surely there’s a better way to teach Texans how to prevent another Holocaust.
So, who cares what Abbott says? I’m grateful Garza and Rodriguez modeled a world where we simply don’t. The sooner we follow their bold lead, the better off we’ll all be.
This story was originally published May 15, 2025 at 1:14 PM with the headline "Greg Abbott thinks he’s protecting Israel. But he’s a hypocrite on antisemitism | Opinion."
