San Antonio Report
by Iris Dimmick
The failed San Antonio City Council resolution to call for a cease-fire in Israel’s war with the Palestinian militant group Hamas has left a bitter aftertaste in the mouths of both those who rallied for its passage and celebrated its defeat.
A coalition of Muslim leaders and community organizers in San Antonio said they were “saddened” and “blindsided” last week when potential mayoral contender Councilman Manny Pelaez (D8) effectively killed the resolution he and others had proposed three weeks earlier.
“We believed this vote was going to happen, because Councilman Pelaez not only helped to author the resolution, but he also signed the memo calling for the special session” to discuss the resolution, according to a statement from the Muslim coalition, which does not have a formal name.
Members of the Jewish community were also left puzzled by Pelaez’s comments last week. The Jewish Federation of San Antonio was glad the resolution was halted, but Nammie Ichilov, its president and CEO, said he was “surprised” that Pelaez later said he would have voted in favor had the resolution hypothetically made it to the dais.
Pelaez, who represents District 8 and is a likely mayoral candidate in 2025, had joined Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2) and Councilwoman Teri Castillo (D5) in a Dec. 20 request for a meeting to vote on the resolution.
About three weeks after he signed the meeting memo, Pelaez decided to withdraw his signature, which ultimately led to the cancellation of the council meeting. The backtrack sparked outrage among pro-Palestinian activists, who have been calling for a cease-fire resolution for months and disrupted a council meeting last week.
On the same day Pelaez withdrew his signature, he joined Mayor Ron Nirenberg and City Manager Erik Walsh to meet with Muslim and community organizers who supported the resolution.
Pelaez said he had been considering withdrawing his signature “for about 24 hours before I met with these folks.”
“… What really gelled it for me, [was] receiving a call from two of the elders of the largest mosque in San Antonio — who I won’t name,” he said, recalling that they told him: “If what you’re looking for is permission from your Muslim friends, who love you, we want to encourage you to pull your support. It really is not the right time and it’s not the right vehicle for what you’re trying to accomplish.”
After Pelaez’s change of heart, Nirenberg, who had consistently shown no interest in such a resolution, officially canceled the meeting.
Pro-Palestinian activists interrupted the January 11 City Council session, causing Mayor Ron Nirenberg to call a recess.
Credit: Scott Ball / San Antonio Report
Pelaez said he was motivated to put forward a resolution because people in District 8, which includes most of San Antonio’s synagogues and several large mosques, were experiencing pain, anxiety and fear — turning “this geopolitical issue into a crisis that was being felt in very real ways in my district,” he said.
But he also received calls from people from several religious denominations who feared that a resolution would stoke violence in an already tense environment.
“No resolution is worth the price of creating more trauma and creating more anxiety for one’s safety,” he told the San Antonio Report on Thursday. “That is too high a price to pay for any resolution, no matter how well-intentioned that was.”
Still, Pelaez told the San Antonio Report on Thursday that he would “vote yes” if the resolution came before him as written.
“If the Pope says it and I … vote to affirm what the Pope said, I think I’m in pretty good company,” he said, referencing Pope Francis’ call for a cease-fire.
After learning about Pelaez’s stance, Ichilov said he didn’t realize the councilman “was comfortable with the language of the resolution, which was not what the Jewish community was led to believe.”
Bilal Dieri, a Muslim community organizer, also said it was “confusing” for Pelaez to rescind his signature and then say he still would have supported the resolution.
It was also a surprise that the councilman removed his name from the memo, Dieri said. “There was never any indication of him removing his name. That didn’t come up even once, in any discussions. … He did say that he was under a lot of pressure.”
Most local stakeholders who spoke to the San Antonio Report this week about the resolution could agree on very few things as the Israel-Hamas war still rages after the deaths of an estimated 1,200 people during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the taking of hostages, followed by tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in Israel’s attack on Gaza. One thing they did agree on, however, is that this isn’t a religious, “Muslims versus Jews” issue, as leaders from both sides put it.
And as the fallout of a resolution that failed in a city hall more than 7,000 miles from the conflict illustrates, what most clearly divides San Antonians is how best to approach the issue locally.
Crafting the cease-fire resolution
When Pelaez worked with pro-Palistinian activists and progressive council members he typically clashes with on the dais to initiate the resolution last month, he thought its final wording was “rather innocuous, and even verges on platitude.”
The now-defunct resolution stated that, as one of the largest U.S. cities, San Antonio has a “global voice to speak out and a responsibility to do so,” calling for “an immediate and permanent cease-fire in Israel and Palestine and the return of all hostages immediately.”
Pelaez said he spoke with several activists, Muslim leaders and Jewish leaders before signing the memo to call for a special meeting. At the time, the Jewish leaders told him not to move forward, he recalled. “And I did anyway.”
The two-sentence resolution — far shorter than those approved in San Francisco, several other cities and the United Nations — was seen by many as anything but innocuous and highlighted the deep divisions on how San Antonians, particularly those with ties to Israel and the Middle East, view the war.
The backlash to the memo was swift, Pelaez said: “My phone started ringing off the hook.
“I started hearing from people who usually are quiet and don’t get involved in city council affairs, telling me: ‘Hey, man, this is — albeit well-intentioned — but you are creating the perfect recipe for more trauma.'”
Pelaez said he told Muslim leaders and others who supported the resolution during their Jan. 9 meeting about these concerns and that the resolution would fail anyway.
“I don’t know why they would feel blindsided” by his later decision to rescind his signature, Pelaez said. “I told them: We are going to lose. And so we’ve got a choice in front of us … we pull back and find another way to address this very important topic or we move forward on this kamikaze mission. … I told them that I don’t think the city council needs to get involved in geopolitical issues.”
That’s not how Judith Norman, a Trinity University philosophy professor and member of the local chapter of Jewish Voices for Peace who attended that meeting, remembers it.
“In the meeting, [Pelaez] gave every indication that he was in favor of the cease-fire resolution,” Norman said. “I left the meeting feeling like we had three signatures.”
Pelaez attributed that discrepancy to their different perspectives on the meeting and the issue as a whole.
“I’m not saying that they’re remembering this inaccurately, I’m just saying they’re remembering what they need to remember in order to align with [their] lens,” he said.
During the same private meeting with those in favor of the proposition, Nirenberg indicated he could not support it, citing concerns he later referenced in a Jan. 10 statement canceling the council meeting, Norman said.
“Wading into a complex and volatile international environment with an incomplete
understanding could prove to be reckless,” Nirenberg wrote in the statement. “In consideration of our goal to ease rather than exacerbate trauma within our community, the special meeting will not be scheduled now that the request lacks the required support.”
But the cease-fire resolution didn’t start the local discussion and tension about the war — that was already here, Norman said. “Avoiding the cease-fire resolution isn’t going to avoid division. Our concern is that there’s an ongoing genocide [of Palestinians in Gaza]. … We can’t heal while harm is being done.”
That concern is among a wide cross-section of demographics, she said, including Muslims and Jews, and U.S. leaders aren’t listening.
“We need to go to a local level in order to show our collective power to exercise our collective voice,” Norman said.
But a non-binding resolution from the San Antonio City Council won’t stop harm from being done locally or in Gaza, Ichilov said, and “we just don’t think that it’s the place for city council to get into international resolutions.”
If Ichilov was to support a revamped resolution, it would use the word “peace,” not “cease-fire” and describe the conflict as being between Israel and Hamas, not Israel and Palestine, he said.
Ichilov said he thought Pelaez understood “the sensitivity of the Jewish community’s position on the language.”
Dieri said the coalition of Muslim leaders and aligned community organizations will continue to push for a cease-fire.
“We’re trying to take a stance against [violence],” he said. “And we’re trying to encourage other people to be brave enough to do that rather than just remain silent and let it happen.”
Pelaez moves forward
Pelaez, meanwhile, is trying to move forward by rebuilding trust with stakeholders on all sides of the resolution dispute.
“I think there’s more creative and more impactful ways of helping people than just the resolution,” he said. “I’ve been talking to the UT Health Science Center … about having a meeting where we invite physicians and mental health providers and even teachers about how we speak to the constituencies we serve about this issue.”
Still, he does not regret bringing the controversial resolution into the spotlight — nor does he regret withdrawing it.
“I’m a firm believer that leaders who adapt to new information and new facts are good leaders,” he said.
As for how this affects his potential run for mayor, Pelaez said “my family and my law partner and I still have to have a lot of conversation” about that.
Though many political observers have speculated that the resolution was part of his mayoral ambitions, Pelaez said that didn’t affect his thinking about how to handle the resolution.
“We’re talking about what appears to be violations of the Geneva Convention, we’re talking about people dying, we’re talking about people burying their children, we’re talking about kidnaps and rapes,” Pelaez said. “It would be a real betrayal of everything I believe is important to let my aspirations of being mayor play into my decision as to whether or not to say that [war] is bad.”
But he added that the resolution likely won’t be at the top of voters’ minds when they head to the polls in next year’s mayoral election.
“The majority of San Antonians still vote on issues of safety, infrastructure, and taxes,” he said. “The issue of whether or not we do non-binding resolutions on what’s happening on the other side of the planet probably isn’t going to move the needle at the polls. So that’s why this doesn’t really calculate into the algebra I do in determining whether I support [this resolution] or not.”