Texas-Israel Relationship: Trade, Anti-BDS Laws, and Divestment

The Texas–Israel relationship runs on three tracks at once: roughly $4 billion in annual two-way trade, a state anti-boycott law that conditions most government contracts on a written promise not to boycott Israel, and an active political posture from the governor’s office that reaches pension divestment, university speech policies, and a planned state trade office in Jerusalem.¹

Trade and Investment

In 2024, total trade between Texas and Israel reached approximately $4 billion. Texas exported about $757.9 million in goods to Israel and imported roughly $3.2 billion.¹ The trade concentrates in aerospace and defense, cybersecurity, energy and clean technology, semiconductors, life sciences, and advanced manufacturing.²

Between January 2015 and December 2024, Israeli firms completed 34 investment projects in Texas, representing $3.2 billion in capital investment and more than 4,200 jobs. Israel ranks 19th among source countries for foreign direct investment projects in the state.¹ Texas has also doubled its holdings of Israeli bonds to $280 million.²

The largest Israeli-owned employer in the state is Elbit Systems of America, the U.S. subsidiary of Israel’s biggest defense electronics firm. Elbit America is headquartered in Fort Worth, with additional operations in San Antonio, and produces night-vision systems, ground combat platforms, and electronic warfare systems for the U.S. military.³⁴ DFW International Airport has offered nonstop service to Tel Aviv since September 2020.²

A State of Texas Office in Jerusalem

During the 89th Legislative Session in 2025, Texas moved to open a permanent State of Texas Israel Office in Jerusalem. Senate Concurrent Resolution 24, by Senator Phil King, and House Concurrent Resolution 90, by Representative Giovanni Capriglione, both endorsed the office and described Jerusalem as the “eternal, undivided capital of the State of Israel.”⁵⁶

The Governor’s Office of Economic Development and Tourism issued a Request for Proposals in November 2025 to stand up the office, with submissions closing in January 2026 and a planned launch in early 2026.⁷ Texas already runs trade offices in Mexico and Taiwan; the Jerusalem post is meant to serve commerce with Israel and with Abraham Accords partner nations.

How the Anti-Boycott Law Works

The legal spine of Texas’s Israel policy is House Bill 89, signed by Governor Greg Abbott in 2017 and codified at Chapter 2270 of the Texas Government Code. It bars state agencies and other governmental entities from contracting with a company unless the company certifies in writing that it does not and will not boycott Israel during the contract term.⁸

The statute defines “boycott Israel” broadly to include refusing to deal with, terminating business activities with, or otherwise acting to penalize, harm economically, or limit commercial relations with Israel or with a person or entity doing business in Israel or in Israeli-controlled territory. An “ordinary business purposes” exception is written into the law.⁸

After a federal court blocked the original version, the legislature narrowed the law in 2019 through House Bill 793, which Governor Abbott signed on May 7, 2019. The amendment excluded sole proprietorships from the definition of “company” and limited the certification requirement to contracts worth $100,000 or more with companies that have ten or more full-time employees.⁹

The Comptroller’s Boycott List and Pension Divestment

HB 89 also created Chapter 808 of the Government Code, which directs the Texas Comptroller to maintain and publish a list of companies determined to be boycotting Israel. State entities with investment authority — including the Employees Retirement System, the Teacher Retirement System, the Permanent School Fund, and the University of Texas Investment Management Company — must divest from the publicly traded securities of listed companies within 360 days of notification, unless doing so conflicts with fiduciary duty. Listed companies get 90 days to change course before divestment moves forward.¹⁰

The Comptroller updates the list periodically; the most recent update was published in November 2025.¹¹ As of a 2023 Attorney General advisory, the list included 11 companies, including Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Inc., its parent Unilever PLC, and several European financial institutions and firms.¹²

Ben & Jerry’s and Unilever

In July 2021, Ben & Jerry’s announced it would stop selling ice cream in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Governor Abbott and Comptroller Glenn Hegar triggered the Chapter 808 review, and on September 23, 2021, Hegar added both Ben & Jerry’s and Unilever to the boycott list.¹³ The listing put roughly $100 million in state pension fund holdings of Unilever at risk of divestment.¹⁴ Attorney General Ken Paxton also led a 12-state coalition letter to Unilever expressing concerns about the boycott.¹⁵

Airbnb

After Airbnb said it would remove listings in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Comptroller Hegar added the company to the boycott list on March 1, 2019. State employees booking travel through Airbnb were affected, and the company faced loss of state contracts if the issue was not resolved within 90 days.¹⁶ Airbnb reversed the settlement policy, and the Comptroller’s office began reviewing the company for delisting in April 2019.¹⁷

Court Challenges

The law drew closely watched First Amendment litigation. The lead case was Amawi v. Paxton, filed in December 2018 by Bahia Amawi, a children’s speech therapist who lost her contract with the Pflugerville Independent School District after declining to sign the anti-boycott certification. The case was consolidated with challenges by John Pluecker, George Hale, and others who said they had lost work for the same reason.¹⁸

On April 25, 2019, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman granted a preliminary injunction blocking HB 89. He found the certification requirement functioned as a content- and viewpoint-based restriction on political speech, compelled speech, and imposed unconstitutional conditions on public employment, and wrote that because the law was “not supported by a permissible aim of government, no amount of narrowing its application will cure its constitutional infirmity.”¹⁹⁹

In April 2020, a unanimous Fifth Circuit panel vacated the injunction and dismissed the case as moot. The court did not decide the constitutional question. It held that HB 793’s 2019 amendment had exempted the sole-proprietor plaintiffs from the certification requirement, so they no longer had a personal stake in the outcome.¹⁸ In April 2023, the Fifth Circuit affirmed a separate dismissal on standing, finding the plaintiff had “demonstrated no actual harms to himself or his constitutional rights.”²⁰

The amended law remains in force. No federal appellate court has definitively ruled on whether the post-2019 version is constitutional, and the broader national picture is unsettled: district courts in Kansas, Arizona, Texas, and Georgia have struck down similar laws, while the Eighth Circuit upheld Arkansas’s version in 2022. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up the Arkansas case in February 2023.²¹

One boundary is worth noting for individuals. In October 2017, the city of Dickinson required applicants for Hurricane Harvey rebuilding grants to certify they did not and would not boycott Israel. The ACLU of Texas called the requirement a First Amendment violation, and Legal Director Andre Segura said, “The government cannot condition hurricane relief or any other public benefit on a commitment to refrain from protected political expression.”²² The Dickinson City Council quickly removed the clause for individual applicants, and Representative Phil King, the author of HB 89, said the law “in no way applies to the type of situation that happened in Dickinson.”²³

Governor Abbott’s Executive Actions

Support for Israel is a signature element of Governor Abbott’s administration. He has traveled to Israel three times since taking office in 2015, including a November 2023 solidarity visit after the October 7 Hamas attack, when he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alongside Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt.²⁴

After October 7, Abbott authorized $4 million in additional grant funding to protect synagogues and Jewish schools, directed state agencies not to purchase goods produced in or exported from the Gaza Strip or from entities tied to Hamas, ordered Texas flags lowered to half-staff, and directed the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission to expand education on the conflict and on antisemitism.²⁴

On March 27, 2024, Abbott issued Executive Order GA-44, requiring Texas public universities to review and update their free speech policies to address antisemitic speech and acts, with punishments up to and including expulsion. The order named the Palestine Solidarity Committee and Students for Justice in Palestine as groups whose activities should be scrutinized, and directed universities to use the definition of antisemitism in Section 448.001 of the Texas Government Code, which follows the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition. Boards of regents had 90 days to report compliance.²⁵²⁶

Related Laws on Antisemitism and Academic Boycotts

Two additional statutes sit alongside HB 89:

HB 3257, passed in 2021 and authored by Representative Phil King, adopted the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism for the state and created the Texas Commission on Antisemitism.²⁷
SB 1517, sponsored by Senator Phil King in 2023, bars public colleges and universities from adopting academic boycotts of foreign countries that would prevent students or faculty from studying, researching, or working with scholars from those countries. Countries designated by the State Department as state sponsors of terrorism are excepted. The bill passed the Senate 27-4 and the House 103-26, and grew out of the 2022 Study on Antisemitism in Texas.²⁸²⁹

Campus Protests and Divestment

The intersection of these laws with campus life became visible in 2024. At the University of Texas at Austin, 57 people were arrested on April 24, 2024, after students tried to occupy the South Lawn; a subsequent protest of more than 500 participants led to 79 additional arrests. At UT Dallas, 17 protesters were arrested after a ten-hour sit-in, and the University of Houston reported two student detainments tied to an encampment.³⁰

Governor Abbott said students engaging in “antisemitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled.” UT System Board of Regents Chairman Kevin Eltife said divestment from Israel was “not an option,” a position Senator Phil King reinforced by pointing out that state law bars a public university from divesting even if it wanted to.³¹

Attorney General Enforcement

The Texas Attorney General’s office defends and enforces the anti-boycott framework. In January 2019, then-Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a brief defending HB 89, arguing that the law targets companies rather than individuals and that the state has the right to withhold taxpayer money from companies engaging in nationality-based discrimination.¹⁵

In October 2023, Paxton issued an advisory reminding governmental entities of their obligations under the anti-boycott, anti-energy-boycott, and anti-firearm-boycott statutes. The advisory stressed that the Comptroller’s list is not exhaustive and that a governmental entity may not “blindly rely” on a contractor’s written verification if publicly available evidence suggests a boycott is underway.¹² For a company doing business with a Texas state agency, that guidance matters: the certification is the floor of compliance, not the ceiling.

1
Office of the Texas Governor. Texas-Israel Economic Profile
2
Business in Texas. Israel Foreign Investment
3
Elbit Systems of America. Elbit Systems of America
4
Fort Worth Chamber. Elbit Systems of America Member Listing
5
Texas Legislature. HCR 90
6
Texas Legislature. SCR 24 Analysis
7
Israel Hayom. Texas Set to Formalize Israel Economic Partnership
8
Texas Legislature. HB 89
9
Husch Blackwell. Texas Amends Israeli Anti-Boycott Law
10
Texas Legislature. HB 89 Analysis
11
Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. Divestment Publications
12
Office of the Texas Attorney General. OAG Advisory on Anti-Boycott Laws
13
Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. Ben and Jerry’s and Its Parent Company Added to Texas List
14
Times of Israel. Texas Takes Steps to Divest From Ben and Jerry’s
15
Office of the Texas Attorney General. AG Paxton Defends Texas Law
16
CBS Austin. Texas Comptroller Blacklists Airbnb Amid Israel Boycott
17
Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. Statement on Airbnb Announcement
18
Courthouse News Service. Fifth Circuit Throws Out Challenge to Texas Ban on Boycotting Israel
19
ACLU of Texas. Court Rules Texas Anti-Boycott Law Unconstitutional
20
Office of the Texas Attorney General. Paxton Wins Major Case Defending Texas’s Anti-Boycott Israel Law
21
ACLU. Supreme Court Declines to Review Challenge to Law Restricting Israel Boycotts
22
ACLU. Texas City Tells People No Hurricane Harvey Aid Unless They Promise Not to Boycott Israel
23
Forward. Texas Town Pulls BDS Clause From Hurricane Relief Application
24
Jewish Herald-Voice. Gov Abbott Visits Israel to Show Support
25
Office of the Texas Governor. Executive Order GA-44
26
Texas Tribune. Israel Hamas War Texas Universities
27
AJC. Jewish Community Supports Bill to Track Antisemitism
28
Texas Legislature. SB 1517
29
Texas Legislature. SB 1517 Analysis
30
Texas Tribune. UT Austin Texas A&M Protest Divestment Israel
31
The Texan. Texas Universities Can’t Legally Divest From Israel