Did a Texas city require residents to sign an "Israel loyalty pledge" in order to be eligible to get relief funds after deadly floods in 2025? No, that's not true: There is no evidence that any Texas town or county impacted by the deadly flooding of July 2025 established any such loyalty pledge. The meme making the claim did not name the city, but it echoed a real attempt by Dickinson, Texas, to require a pledge to not boycott Israel for relief funding in the wake of Hurricane Harvey in 2017. That requirement was retracted after a legal challenge.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on July 9, 2025. The post read:
🚨🇺🇸🇮🇱 BREAKING: A Texas city has required residents to sign an "ISRAEL LOYALTY PLEDGE" to be eligible for relief funds after DEADLY FLOODS.
This is what the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: screenshot of X.com by Lead Stories)
The flooding over the July 4 holiday caused death and destruction in Kerr, Travis, Kendall, Burnet, Williamson, and Tom Green counties. Lead Stories could find no indication that any local governments in that area were making relief funding contingent on a pledge relating to Israel.
No evidence-based "Breaking" reports corroborate the July 2025 claim that a loyalty pledge was forced on survivors of the Independence Day Weekend floods along the Guadalupe River. Lead Stories searched Google News and Yahoo! News for the key words Texas AND Israel AND ''Loyalty Pledge" - Harvey -2017 -Dickinson. Google News' index of thousands of news sites found no such matches. Yahoo!'s self-described index of "a diverse network of news partners and providers" turned up only examples from a 2017 loyalty pledge controversy.
The seed of this claim may be from a previous disaster in Texas. Dickinson, Texas, officials did initially require residents applying for help after Hurricane Harvey hit the town in August 2017, to sign a statement promising not to participate in a boycott of Israel. The officials justified the requirement by citing a Texas law that barred the state from doing business with any contractors that boycott Israel. Dickinson dropped the requirement after a lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in October 2017.
Dickinson is south of Houston, about 300 miles from the 2025 flooding.
