Plans for a special meeting of the San Antonio City Council to consider a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Israel’s war with the Palestinian militant group Hamas have been canceled following Councilman Manny Pelaez’s withdrawal of his request for the meeting.
Pelaez, who represents District 8 and is a likely mayoral candidate in 2025, joined Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2) and Councilwoman Teri Castillo (D5) in asking for a meeting to vote on the resolution.
But weeks after the trio submitted the Dec. 20 request, Pelaez asked to rescind his signature after “having conducted meaningful dialogues with diverse stakeholders in District 8.”
“It was clear that there are people with an intent to make this a circus,” Pelaez said in an interview Wednesday. “People intended to take a victory lap, if you will, at the expense of the very raw feelings that other people were going to be bringing to the conversation.”
Members of San Antonio for Justice in Palestine had called for supporters to pack a Jan. 11 meeting that Mayor Ron Nirenberg delayed at Pelaez’s request. Pelaez had already worked to bring the resolution down to a narrow two-sentence focus, and asked for more time for stakeholders to provide feedback.
He wrote Nirenberg on Tuesday, asking to take his name off the Dec. 20 request, effectively canceling a meeting the mayor planned to call in February.
Without Pelaez’s support, it’s now unlikely the City Council will vote on a cease-fire resolution, as many other blue cities have done in recent weeks. Nirenberg has shown no interest in the move, and three signatures are required to call a special City Council meeting.
“No gesture — however well-intended — from our city’s government can capture the intricacies or the history of the Arab/Palestinian-Israeli conflict, nor could it appropriately represent the breadth of the grief and pain that has been felt for generations,” Nirenberg wrote in a letter to the council Wednesday announcing that the February meeting would no longer be scheduled.
“Wading into a complex and volatile international environment with an incomplete understanding could prove to be reckless,” Nirenberg wrote.
The Jewish Federation of San Antonio welcomed that news in an email Wednesday, saying, “Our collective action to educate our leaders has worked.”
Supporters of the resolution are looking for other options to continue pushing for a meeting, according to McKee-Rodriguez, and irritated with Pelaez’s backtracking.
“This is one of the weakest moves I’ve ever seen from any Councilmember ever,” McKee-Rodriguez (D2) said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Tuesday night.
“If you’re gonna do something stand on it. You had months of testimony, months to consider a special session, you volunteered your signature, but got scared of criticism,” McKee-Rodriguez wrote. “Anyone but Manny for Mayor.”
Pelaez is among a handful of City Council members exploring the possibility of an open mayor’s race next year. He’s term-limited from seeking reelection to his Northwest council district, which includes most of San Antonio’s synagogues.
Another Northside council member considering a mayoral run, District 9’s John Courage, last week voiced his opposition to City Council considering a resolution on the Israel-Hamas war.
“I am deeply concerned that this council would even consider such a resolution given that we have no authority over world events or those of independent sovereign nations,” he wrote in an email to constituents.
On Tuesday night, the Bexar County Democrats attempted to pass their own cease-fire resolution, modeled after one approved by the state party. But after roughly two hours of disagreements, the matter was tabled and sent back to the steering committee for reconsideration.
While progressives said Pelaez’s initial support for the cease-fire resolution was evidence of him trying to represent a bigger constituency, Pelaez said Wednesday he’s still figuring out whether his personal beliefs match those of the city at large.
“Mayors need to bring their priorities and their values to the table, but they have to match up with the priorities and values of the people,” he said. “There’s still people on multiple sides of town and in different sectors who I still need to visit with, but I’ve been working pretty aggressively on visiting a lot of them and I’ve learned a lot.”
At Pelaez’s request, he, Nirenberg and City Manager Erik Walsh met with supporters and opponents of the council’s proposed cease-fire resolution on Tuesday.
Though he had hoped to facilitate a larger discussion, Pelaez said smaller meetings may be the best venue for this particularly thorny issue. Pro-Palestinian activists have been packing City Council’s public comment sessions and protesting outside the mayor’s neighborhood.
“I don’t think that a resolution, no matter how well intentioned, should come at the cost of traumatizing and creating more anger in very vulnerable pockets of San Antonio,” he said.
“There’s a lot of people out there who seem to believe that this [resolution] will result in a genuine cease-fire in Israel and Palestine,” he said. “One has to be very naive to think that.”
McKee-Rodriguez said the goal of passing local resolutions is to put political pressure on federal leaders who do have resources to push for change.
“[Pelaez’s] basically affirmed that he doesn’t believe that our constituents and our community, or that we as a council, can have an intelligent discussion about about the topic at hand,” he said. “I think that’s inaccurate.”
