By the time the pro-Palestinian demonstrators showed up in front of Houston Mayor John Whitmire’s house one night in mid-September, the cops had been awaiting them for at least an hour. A dozen or so young men and women lined up on the sidewalk as roughly the same number of Houston police officers watched impassively, standing by their cruisers. The protesters were aligned with activists who had been pleading with Whitmire and the city council to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and to disinvest from Israeli interests. Most of their faces were covered with masks or keffiyehs, the distinctive scarves that have become symbols of the Palestinian liberation movement.
They chanted at roughly the same volume as kids in a classroom reciting the Pledge of Allegiance: “Palestine will be free.” “You are killing children.” They held signs: “Every ten minutes a child in Gaza loses one or more limbs!” “Boycott, divest, sanction.” A small device projected soap bubbles into the air, while a little girl drew patterns on the sidewalk with colored chalk—an activity to keep her amused as the adults around her set about the serious business of protesting.
To hear Whitmire tell it, the protesters—who’ve demonstrated in front of his home near Memorial Park on the west side at least a dozen times in the past six months—were altogether more menacing: shouting through bullhorns, blocking his driveway, banging drums. (Of course, the demonstrators might have been more subdued than usual the night I observed them because they knew a journalist was present.) “I hide in my house,” Whitmire said in a recent interview, describing his reaction to the demonstrators, who have also appeared regularly at the homes of Senator Ted Cruz and Congresswoman Lizzie Fletcher.
In mid-July, after police briefly detained eight protesters near the mayor’s house, Whitmire’s administration proposed a city ordinance that would prohibit targeted picketing within two hundred feet of a residential building and ban the city from issuing permits for demonstrations in front of a home. The proposal drew immediate pushback from groups representing the activists, First Amendment advocates including the American Civil Liberties Union, and city council members. Whitmire, who surely learned how to count votes during his fifty years in the Texas Legislature, executed a tactical retreat. In August he referred the matter to the council’s public safety committee for review and potential revision—often a strategy mayors employ to bury controversial measures while saving face—commenting at the time that “I’ve never seen a piece of legislation that couldn’t be improved.”
The committee’s September meeting came and went without discussion of this ordinance. As the October meeting approached, committee chairwoman Amy Peck texted that it had not received any proposed revisions from the administration. “It sounds like they do not want to take this up anymore,” Peck wrote.
Whitmire confirmed in our interview that he does not intend to move forward on the ordinance in the foreseeable future. “I quite frankly don’t have time to mess with it,” said the mayor, who continued to characterize the protests as a threat to his and his neighbors’ safety. “It was so misrepresented by special interest groups. It was just giving too much opportunity for my political critics to take me off my focus of running city business.”
Whitmire’s response to the demonstrations—and the response to his response—has unfolded against a backdrop of increasing national tension between the constitutional right to peaceful protest and efforts to crack down on demonstrations. In March, Governor Greg Abbott ordered the state’s public colleges and universities to revise their free speech policies to include punishments for antisemitic speech and acts, singling out two pro-Palestinian student groups for discipline, including possible expulsion. In April dozens of University of Texas at Austin students were arrested at a pro-Palestine rally as police used flash bangs and pepper spray against them. A few months later, however, UT leaders eased proposed disciplinary measures against arrested protesters, offering them a form of probation that would allow them, under certain conditions, to remain in class and keep the disciplinary action from appearing on their final transcripts.
Whitmire’s proposed restrictions on protests have precedent in Texas: Dallas and Pearland, twenty miles south of Houston, have laws limiting residential protests based on distance to homes, the Houston Chronicle reported.
Whitmire told me that he strongly supports Americans’ First Amendment right to “peacefully assemble.” But the pro-Palestinian demonstrators, he said, have crossed a line by shouting through bullhorns and banging drums, blocking his driveway and shining lights into his house. “It’s frightening to get my mail from my mailbox,” he said. “It disrupts the entire neighborhood, and it’s a horrible waste of [Houston police] resources,” as officers monitor the protests to protect affected residents and ensure that no laws are broken.
When I pressed Whitmire on why he feels a threat to his safety, he cited the sheer intensity of the protesters’ emotions, noting that some of them hold white bundles representing babies killed in Gaza. “They are very aggressive,” he said. “They’re screaming at me that I’m a baby killer.”
Activists I spoke to denied that the demonstrators have threatened anyone’s safety. “To my knowledge, the only violence has been by the mayor calling the police on folks,” said Nishu Siddique, an organizer with Houston For Palestinian Liberation, who was not among those protesting outside Whitmire’s home.
What effect a call for a ceasefire resolution would have is unclear; matters of international relations will not be changed by a Houston declaration. But Siddique said the activists want Houston and other local governments to support one to reflect the will of Americans—polls show that a plurality disapprove of Israeli military action in Gaza.
While Whitmire has referred to the situation in the Middle East as a “tragedy,” he’s steadfastly rejected calls by activists to weigh in. He said he doesn’t think it’s appropriate for him to take public positions on national or international issues over which he has no control. Houston’s mayor, unlike those in most Texas municipalities, actually runs the city, and Whitmire says he has his hands full dealing with issues like balancing the budget and improving public safety. Other major Texas cities have also resisted pleas for a ceasefire resolution, on similar grounds.
Whitmire, however, appeared to veer from this public neutrality stance in June, when he spoke to a group of Jewish residents celebrating the seventy-sixth anniversary of Israel’s founding. “I do want to be the mayor—I am the mayor of all Houston—and when some of your enemies challenged me to do a proclamation for a ceasefire, I would not respond,” Whitmire said, as reported by the news website Chron.com. When I asked the mayor why he seemed to have referred to advocates of a ceasefire—who include thousands of Israeli citizens—as enemies of the Jewish state, Whitmire said, “That comment was taken out of context. We were in a discussion, I said I stand with them against their enemies.” The mayor’s spokeswoman, Mary Benton, said at the time that Whitmire’s comments referred to Hamas and its supporters.
Whitmire also continues to assert that some of the protesters at his home are getting support from outside interests, including groups connected to Iran. Protest leaders have denied this, and Whitmire has attributed the information to law enforcement sources he is not free to identify. “That’s not speculation,” the mayor told me.
When I asked him if he intends to bring the ordinance back for consideration in the future, he said it would remain a “pending item” until he felt he and other city officials had time to deal with it. Given the mayor’s decision to put the brakes on this ordinance, the debate over its merits has dropped out of the news cycle. Meanwhile, the Houston protests continue, the mayor is still disturbed by them, and death and destruction in the Middle East show no signs of abating. Among all the players in this drama, the one in the most enviable position might be the little girl with the colored chalk.
