Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Texas Town Deletes Israel Boycott Clause From Hurricane Relief Grants

(JTA) — Private citizens who apply for Hurricane Harvey rebuilding funds in Dickinson, Texas no longer have to certify that they will not boycott Israel.

The Dickinson City Council on Tuesday voted to remove a clause from a relief application that had drawn the ire of the American Civil Liberties Union and pro-boycott activists, the Houston Chronicle reported.

The city, located near Houston, put the requirement in the application in order to comply with a new state law, signed in May, that requires all state contractors to certify that they are not participating in boycotts of Israel.

During the meeting on Tuesday, the council created two different applications for contracting with the city: one for businesses and one for private citizens. Businesses will still have to certify that they do not participate in the anti-Israel boycott.

Dickinson, a city of about 19,000, was hit especially hard by Harvey. More than three-quarters of its homes were damaged by the hurricane, and 830 were destroyed.

State Rep. Phil King, the author of the state legislation, said last week that the law, which went into effect on Sept. 1, “in no way applies to the type of situation that happened in Dickinson.”

The ACLU complained that linking aid to an individual’s support of the Israel boycott is a violation of free speech rights.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.