California Water, Israeli Interests, Part I: Venture Capitalist Stephen DeBerry's Israel Pandering at TUHSD Sheds Accidental Light on Israel's Interest in California Water/Ag

Closely linked with Newsom and Kapor Capital, DeBerry tries to wed a program for Black students to pro-Israel interests, and inadvertently exposes a California-Israeli network of thirsty billionaires

A new, successful, and much-loved support program for Black students at Tamalpais High School is on the chopping block. Suddenly, a interracial couple in Mill Valley linked to "woke" billionaire Mitch Kapor and Governor Newsom have appeared as rescuers. But is there a poison pill in their pitch? And what can Stephen Deberry's long support for Israel tell us about an under-reported 2014 California-Israel trade agreement signed by then-Governor Jerry Brown?

Part I in this series introduces Stephen DeBerry and his wife Cristine Soto DeBerry and is divided into sections that cover the couples' suddenly public involvement in rescuing a Black student support program; Cristine Soto DeBerry's "progressive prosecutor" mien; Stephen DeBerry's predatory "social justice" investments, his ties to Israeli- invested billionaires including Mitch Kapor and Lynda and Stewart Resnick, and his promotion of Israeli water technology.

Part II, to be published next week, examines Stephen DeBerry's initial claims about Israeli water "delivery", (which has historically relied on stealing Palestinian water resources, and which in 2025 appears to involve seizing control of water resources in Lebanon and Syria); Governor Brown's 2014 California-Israel tech-heavy trade agreement; and how Israeli surveillance and water technology have been implemented, for better or worse, in California — and the vocal support for it in Marin.

These are going to be long (and somewhat complicated) articles, so I will try to record audio versions.

California Water, Israeli Interests, Part I: Arsonists Make The Best Firefighters

Two weeks ago, Stephen DeBerry, an Aspen Institute regular and a venture capitalist whose wardrobe affects a kind of Russell Brand vibe (screenshot below), rushed into a board meeting of the Tamalpais Union High School District in moneyed Marin County, California.

The timing of his appearance was striking. Though DeBerry had never appeared at any TUHSD board meeting before, he had managed to pick as his debut the very meeting where a group of white, pro-Israel Marinites had again gather to inveigh against both ethnic studies curricula and an alleged incident of antisemitism.

Interrupting the proceedings, DeBerry announced to the Board with some urgency that he had been on the zoom waitlist for public comment, but wished instead to speak in person. After the board granted him this, Deberry, whose Bronze Capital firm has a penchant for investment in predatory start-ups, approached the podium and said that he had come to voice support for "the Hub", an innovative and successful support program for Black students run by Marin City native Paul Austin and his wife, Tenisha Tate-Austin.

For reasons not made clear, the Hub is suddenly at risk of not having its contract renewed, and is now, metaphorically, a kind of "damsel in distress". (Typically, in the frenzy of finding someone to save said damsel, no one has asked who put her in need of saving in the first place.)

Yet magically, and surely spontaneously, a knight had arrived: After voicing support for the Hub, DeBerry, the venture capitalist with friends in high places (but who still lives in a modest $3.8 million home in Mill Valley's Strawberry District), turned away from the Board to pander to the majority pro-Israel audience: "Also, I didn't know about the Jewish issue that was happening. I just got off a plane yesterday and returned from Israel myself."

The white pro-Israel crowd then erupted into applause and cheers.

Sir, You Just Returned from... Where?

For most Americans, the announcement in May of 2025 of a recent jaunt to Israel — a country that is currently enforcing famine on Palestinians in Gaza and still bombing its remaining hospitals — would be alarming. And in most other counties, the logical question after hearing DeBerry's travel description would be: what kind of business, exactly, did you still have in Israel in May 2025? And who were you meeting in Israel? And, not least, is there anything you were engaged in promoting within Israel that makes you complicit in Israel's ongoing war crimes and genocide?

But in Marin, DeBerry's shameless announcement of his ghoulish travel itinerary was warmly received by the white Israel supporters in the audience. DeBerry continued, "And I think it points to a larger issue. It's not Black, it's not Jewish. But it's about inclusive support of each other as a community."

Again, the white pro-Israel audience members erupted into applause and cheering — finally, the pro-Israel, anti-ethnic studies crowd might have a pro-Israel Black ally to "plug and play"! The cheering prompted the Board to remind the attendees that their applause was eating into DeBerry's allotted one minute of speaking time. DeBerry then stated that while his specific request was for continued support of the Hub, "the broader comment that I would just make publicly is about solidarity with all of the folks who are under distress in this moment. And just for us to stand together at this moment. I'm with you. I hope you'll stand with us and the Hub specifically."

But who was included in DeBerry's "us"? Who, exactly, was "under distress at this moment"? The answer was made clear when DeBerry whisked straight past the Black attendees concerned about the Hub — most of whom he had never met — to schmooze outside with the all-white pro-Israel attendees he had just successfully courted.

Wait, Which Groups Are "Distressed", Again?

To DeBerry, the "distressed" population was just as much Black students (who have legitimate grievances for repeated acts of abuse suffered in the school district) as the pampered, white, pro-Israel parents who had repeatedly expressed extreme racism, including their repeated objections to any curriculum that even mentioned the Black Panthers, who once had a significant presence in Marin City. DeBerry's equation of the two “distresses” was a kind of DEI on acid, something only Silicon Valley would try to mash together.

But his pandering to the white pro-Israel, anti-ethnic studies crowd was especially ironic given that the Black Panthers were decidedly, loudly, pro-Palestinian, as were other prominent Black cultural figures from Malcolm X to Muhammad Ali. The photograph below shows Muhammad Ali touring a Palestinian refugee camp in South Lebanon in the early 1970s.

The story of Black Panther and Black Muslim support for Palestinian liberation is much richer than photographs can describe, and it's yet another reason why ethnic studies is being targeted by the pro-Israel crowd.

The Israel Lobby is hiring!

DeBerry's pandering to the pro-Israel, anti-ethnic studies crowd was of a piece with the Israel lobby's "Jews of Color Initiative" (JCI). JCI received a hefty grant from Steven Spielberg out of his controversial Genesis Prize award, which is administered by the Israeli government and the Jewish Agency for Israel. (The 2025 Genesis Prize was awarded this past January to Argentina's deeply unstable and despotic President Javier Milei for his unwavering loyalty to Israel throughout its ongoing genocide.)

The JCI, founded the same year as the Temple Mount crisis in 2017, and a year before Israel's murderous repression of the Palestinians during their largely peaceful March of Great Return, has aimed to convince non-white minorities in the US that Israel isn't actually a racist, apartheid system. Outside of Marin, it doesn't appear to be working. Inside of Marin, it isn't succeeding, either.

Ex-Newsom Chief of Staff Cristine Soto DeBerry Starts a Petition:

The following week, Deberry's wife, Cristine Soto DeBerry, appeared on KRON-TV (screenshot above) to announce that she had started a petition to save the Hub program. Soto DeBerry was for many years Newsom's Deputy Chief of Staff when Newsom was Mayor of San Francisco. As such, she was often in the position of defending criticism that Newsom had packed his office with cronies who did not represent the diverse population of San Francisco. Soto DeBerry also had the grim task of helping Newsom recover his reputation after he had an affair with the wife of his good friend and campaign manager, Alex Tourk. (DeBerry, Newsom, and Tourk's now ex-wife, Ruby Gibney, now live in Marin County, within miles of one another.)

But loyalty to Newsom has its benefits! Soto DeBerry has since started a nonprofit that operates under the fiscal sponsorship of the Tides Foundation, which makes it that much harder to track. The nonprofit, "Prosecutors Alliance", claims to be "the country's first reform-oriented law enforcement association... advancing the conversation on how to create public safety and promote justice."

As I reported in 2023, Soto DeBerry played a key part in Marin County's conflict-laden "Sheriff Civilian Oversight Working Group" (SCOWG), which willfully excluded any Black Marin City residents from its secretive meetings. The moneyed DeBerry was, in fact, the only Latino appointee to the SCOWG: Willfully excluded from its 15-member group were any workingclass or poor Latinos. Once again, Canal and West Marin Latinos were shut out of the process that was supposed to assist them, in favor of a wealthy prosecutor whose political connections extended deep into Newsom's network.

Soto DeBerry is rumored to be appointed the first "Inspector General" for the County's sheriff oversight project, created from the toothless blueprint Soto DeBerry helped promote. Thus, if there is to be oversight of the Marin County Sheriff, it is unlikely to come from Soto DeBerry. A recent exposé in Bolts provided a link to a government document showing the relatively high amount of SCAAP funding Marin County receives for its cooperation with ICE, a matter on which Soto DeBerry has been, at least publicly, silent.

In fact, if Soto DeBerry has ever made any statement against the Marin County Sheriff, it is not easily found in the public record. (Both Soto DeBerry and her husband have repeatedly declined requests for comment, at one point sending a nonprofit director to email me that perhaps my unanswered questions for Soto DeBerry were unwarranted since they are good people who had invited the nonprofit director to their home many times. Got it.)

What Soto DeBerry's involvement in the SCOWG did achieve was to fulfill the County's need for a performative "oversight" to distract from the cash reality: the County was moving an additional $2.8 million to the Marin County Sheriff Office. That is the same law enforcement agency that permitted and participated in pointless (but terrorizing) SWAT raids in Marin City and whose deputy shot at a fleeing Chaka Grayson in Marin City sixteen times, with three of the bullets hitting Grayson's body, leaving him with permanent nerve damage.

Neither Soto DeBerry nor her husband appeared to make any public protest or outreach to the larger community in Marin City after those incidents. Nor did either of the DeBerrys voice any concern publicly about the County Sheriff permitting a 300-car Trump “caravan” to terrorize Marin City on November 1, 2020, as residents were trying to drop off their general election ballots.

And of course, not a word from Soto DeBerry's "Prosecutors Alliance" about California law enforcement agencies receiving training from Israeli military and police, or any of the Israeli surveillance tech California law enforcement uses daily.

And in a week when Oregon was actually providing restitution to Black families whose homes had been improperly seized decades ago, neither DeBerry has even ventured to investigate whether Black Marin City families might be able to seek restitution for the burning of hundreds of their wartime cottages in the early 1960s, a de facto eviction that removed as much as 3/4 of Marin City's Black population. The photograph below is of a much-loved wartime cottage in Marin City prior to its demolition-by-burning by the County, and is provided by the Anne T. Kent Room of the Marin County library:

In other words, stepping in to "Save The Hub!" permits the DeBerry's and their largely white cohort in Mill Valley, (including MVFree, which has been similarly silent on many of the same issues), to lend a performative hand to Marin City – all while dodging entirely the issue of restitution for far more severe, racist policies at the housing and employment level.

The racist policies strictly enforced in Marin were especially critical in the immediate postwar decades, when white men (and even white women) who had not finished high school could, with only a union job, purchase a modest home in Mill Valley, barely a mile from Marin City, where many had worked side-by-side with their Black fellow shipyard workers during WWII. But during and after the war, Black shipyard workers, their wallets fat with pay from the arduous and dangerous work in the shipyards, faced not only racially restrictive housing covenants but redlining. And after the war, those fat wallets were largely depleted as Marinship’s outperforming and hardest workers were restricted from the labor force.

In her recent appearance on KRON TV, Soto DeBerry focused only on the need for Black and Jewish students to "feel safe." Without question, the ongoing physical safety concerns of Black students in Marin County are valid, real and urgent. But there is no indication that Jewish students in Marin County are facing an "unsafe" environment on par with the serious and immediate threats that Black, Asian, Latino and Muslim students still face not only from white peers and white adults, but from law enforcement, including ICE. Meanwhile, pro-Israel students and their parents in Marin have repeatedly engaged in bullying or demeaning other students and residents peacefully engaged in protesting Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

DeBerry's comment was even stranger given that the pro-Israel part of Marin County's Jewish population, which her husband nakedly pandered to just the week earlier, has wielded disproportionate political power, much to the fury of Jewish Marinites who continue to speak out and organize against Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Marin County's Jewish population (13%) is approximately six times the average for the US as a whole, and Marin's Israel-lobby-backed electeds, mostly Christian and Jewish, have successfully quashed any attempts by citizens to push through a ceasefire resolution since November 2023, despite strenuous efforts on the part of Marin’s anti-zionist Jewish residents.

And now come the threats of deportations of student protesters, which pro-Israel lobbying groups such as the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area (SF JCRC) have publicly supported, screenshot below:

And thus, even in Marin City, which desperately wants the Hub program to survive and thrive (and thus needs the support of more powerful neighbors such as the DeBerrys), the comments of the DeBerrys, which promote the notion that Jewish students are somehow facing the same existential threats that Black students are facing, raised eyebrows.

I had not much thought about Soto DeBerry or her husband after writing about her involvement in the oversight group. But Stephen DeBerry's comments on May 20 were startling enough that I started looking into Stephen DeBerry's investments and his connections. I was surprised both by how obviously the companies he invests in (and promotes) exploit the poor and the workingclass. But I was also startled by his apparently ongoing love of Israel, and of Israel water "technology", an interest which seems to have started shortly after Governor Brown inked a trade deal between Israel and California.

If Stephen DeBerry is nothing more than an opportunistic grifter (a trait he shares with many in Silicon Valley, and with legions of self-made Californians before him), he is one whose ties illustrate how Silicon Valley and Israel are linked, a linkage that now encompasses the entire state through AI and water "technology".

An Introduction to Stephen DeBerry, Bronze Capital, and DeBerry's Connection to Mitch Kapor

For at least a decade, Stephen DeBerry has demonstrated a twinned interest in promoting Israeli water "technology" in California, and equally dubious "social justice" investments.

DeBerry is a former partner at Kapor Capital, run by Mitch Kapor, a former crony of the late Warren Hellman (heir to the Wells Fargo fortune through I.W. Hellman), who bragged in his oral history of delivering an earlier crackdown on pro-Palestine protests at UC Berkeley. Like Hellman, Kapor was never very religious until later in life, when he became more curious about Judaism, which appears to dovetail with investments he was making in Israeli tech.

Kapor and his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, have since made a fetish of a kind of "woke" investing, with a "social justice" mission. It is a familiar con, one succinctly identified in Anand Ghirindaras' 2018 Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing The World. In reality, Kapor is heavily invested in environmentally destructive industries such as the "rideshare" behemoth Uber; cryptocurrency; and AI; and has a side business in soi-disant "social justice" projects, which often involve investments in payday lending operations and other predatory projects. (For more on the militarization of AI, read investigative reporter Peter Byrne's series in Project Censored.)

DeBerry nows heads Bronze Capital, which invests in many of the same questionable start-ups that Kapor invests in. Several of DeBerry's investments are little more than predatory scams designed to siphon money not only from the poor, but from the flimsy government programs established to protect or serve them.

DeBerry Investment Projects: Virta and Promise

During DeBerry's recent talk at "Masters of Scale Summit 2024", promoting his investment in Virta, he solemnly presented a claim about "east sides" of cities suffering from highest levels of disparity. (An easy counterpoint in DeBerry's adopted county: Marin City is in Southern Marin, not eastern Marin; the ramshackle housing for Latino farmworkers in Marin is primarily in West Marin.)

In discussing higher rates of diabetes among the poor, DeBerry then bizarrely claimed that "disparity" was somehow indicated by the lack of metal table forks in restaurants in East Palo Alto, and cited the presence of "taco trucks" as factors in obesity-related diabetes. But much of the so-called Global South, which had historically had low rates of diabetes, has traditionally not used "metal forks" for eating, or forks at all. And why pick on taco trucks, when tacos are a food staple in Mexico which, until the advent of Americanized diets, had little history of Type II Diabetes?

But never mind the details, the point of DeBerry's narrative was to herald Bronze Capital's investment in "Virta", a not-yet-profitable enterprise that, for only $299 a month charged to uninsured, low-income diabetes patients(!), provides an online, ketogenic diet. DeBerry claims that Virta has a 60% reversal rate for diabetes "so it's literally 150 times better than the medical standard of care."

In his presentation, DeBerry did not cite any studies, nor did he make any distinction between Type I and Type II Diabetes. But that lack of evidence went unquestioned, since no one in Silicon Valley is interested in addressing patient health, only in the next Theranos-type scam.

Virta has wavered back and forth between inclusion of GLP-1 prescription and "deprescription" and so it is difficult to know if the results Virta claims are linked to its "ketogenic" diet or to the medication. (Neither ketogenic diets nor GLP-1 are without longterm and even short-term complications and side effects.)

When you consider how underfunded public health programs and healthcare workers are, and on how little money many of their patients subsist, you might wonder if the billion dollars that DeBerry claimed Virta had raised wouldn't be better spent on actual health care services, or simply providing walkable infrastructure in poor neighborhoods. Or, God forbid, a living wage so that poor people weren't working two or three jobs that deprived them of the time to actually prepare healthy meals, or to sleep regular hours.

Similarly, DeBerry's Bronze Capital has invested in "Promise" which co-investor Kapor Capital claims "is a modern payment platform that works with government agencies and related organizations that collect anything from utility bills to license fees." In other words, it is a third-party debt collection middleman, which has raised over $50 million in funding on the backs of the poor under the guise of "helping" them. Its purpose appears to be introducing another money-sucking layer of data extraction, just what “the poors” need! And so it goes with many of the Bronze Capital and Kapor Capital "social justice" investments.

That venture capitalists like Mitch Kapor and Stephen DeBerry have been the problem, and not part of any solution, has largely gone unnoticed by local media, which has unquestioningly accepted their "social justice" narrative without examining what the companies they invest in actually do.

DeBerry's Ties To Israeli Water "Technology", and Stewart and Lynda Resnick

DeBerry's impressive talent for scams doesn't limit him to investments in predatory start-ups. DeBerry has been a guest of the giants of California water theft, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, at the Aspen Institute. DeBerry was also a featured speaker at the "Resnick Aspen Action Forum", where his presentation, ironically, asked whether the audience was being honest with itself about "facing", and encouraged the audience to "open the space to that corner of yourself, and feel some warmth in that space, experience some light in that space."

It is new-age gobbledygook, but it is infinitely superior to hearing the pro-Israel Stephen DeBerry talk about "decolonizing your mind" in another Ted-talk-like presentation.

The Resnicks, possibly one of the most infamous couples in California, own the Westside Mutual Water Company, which has a majority stake in the Kern Groundwater Bank Authority. KDBA operates the vast Kern Water Bank. So while the Resnicks do not technically own 60% of California's most precious water resource, they arguably control more of it than almost anyone else.

So much has been written about the Resnicks that I am loathe to repeat it here; the couple is covered in Mark Arax's magisterial The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California, and Yasha Levine's documentary "Pistachio Wars". Both should be required reading/viewing for all Californians, particularly Arax's work, the rich scope of which cannot be neatly summarized.

Levine's scope is more narrow, but timely. In it, he argues that the Resnicks, whose billion-dollar pistachio fortune benefited from an embargo of superior Iranian pistachios, have a vested interest in promoting American and Israeli politicians who are antagonistic toward Iran. (Arax's 2019 book and prior articles also included the Iran detail.) Levine's research showed that the Resnicks were "giving millions to all sorts of lobby groups, slush funds that channel money to pushing for sanctions, and pumping out anti-Iran propaganda. They also made big donations to California Republicans who were hawkish on Iran."

Levine documented that the Resnicks are on the board of the highly conservative and Islamophobic “Washington Institute for Near East Policy”, which has been pushing for war with Iran for years, and includes many of the same people who pushed for the disastrous US war in Iraq.

(The Resnicks are prodigious political donors within California, having given generously to members of California's Jewish Legislative Caucus, authors of the anti-teacher, anti-free speech AB 715 (link).)

What may be most significant about DeBerry's ties to the Resnicks is their mutual fidelity to the State of Israel, which DeBerry has traditionally expressed in a promotion of Israeli water "technology", and which many writers have concluded amounts to little more than water theft. Similarly, in addition to the Resnicks' strangulation of small farmers in the Central Valley, the Resnicks' Fiji Water company has also robbed native Fijians of access to clean water. (The Fijians, like the Palestinians, had not historically suffered from water shortages; these were "man-made" conditions imposed by predatory practices and outright theft by outsiders.)

DeBerry's Promotion of Israeli Water "Technology" Dates Back to 2015, A Year After the Brown/Netanyahu Deal

DeBerry's promotion of bogus Israeli water "technology" started as early as 2015, with an appearance he made on KRON-TV, at the height of California's last drought, and just a year after then-Governor Jerry Brown had signed a landmark trade agreement between California and Israel. In the interview, DeBerry stated:

"We're not trying to reinvent the wheel. A lot of these problems have already been solved. We can look at Israel: 40 to 80% of their water being delivered. Desalination. All these other technologies. We should be able to go much faster than they did, but we're rolling our cars over rails that are movin' a lot slower because of regulatory and other constraints. And so if there's a place for us to innovate, I think it's really on the regulatory front, rather than on the technological front."

DeBerry claimed that 40 to 80% of Israel's water is being "delivered". But there's not a small distance between 40% and 80%. As with DeBerry's claims about Virta, the details don't matter. And look at the magic Silicon Valley solution: deregulation! Never mind that Israeli desalination has frequently produced criminally poisoned water, as reported in The Times of Israel.

Further, as everyone from the United Nations to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem has reported, Israel "solved" its water scarcity by stealing land, and the water underneath it, from Palestinians. Water, as the journalist Ben Ehrenreich and Charlotte Silver have previously reported, has always been used by Israel to control and punish Palestinians, who, even before October 7, had survived for decades on the ever-shrinking amount of water allotted to it by Mekorot, Israel's national water company and principal water manager.

And as Charlotte Silver reported in an earlier 2014 article, Israelis were already consuming five times as much water as Palestinians. This imbalance is upheld by the Israeli military, which has had authority over all sources of water in Gaza (since 1974) and the West Bank (since 1967). Mekorot has been "crucial to the Zionist state-building project, and to that end has aided in Israel's erasure of its original boundaries." Silver reported that Mekorot prohibited Palestinians "from using the water flowing beneath their feet or develop(ing) their own water infrastructure."

Silver continued, "Palestinians in the West Bank have no access to running water, nor do Palestinians have the ability to collect water themselves without explicit permission, which is rarely granted."

Silver reported this in March of 2014, right after Governor Brown signed that trade agreement between California and Israel, almost a decade prior to the start of Israel's current genocide. Thus Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza survived for years on less than what the UN considered a "survivable" amount. That disparity has only grown worse as Israel has destroyed water and sewage infrastructure in its obliteration of Gaza, while restricting "humanitarian relief", including food and water. We are witnessing in real time a genocide of unspeakable proportions, and Israeli control of water plays a major role.

Meanwhile, Israel has used the chaos of its expanding war to seize water sources in Lebanon and Syria. The details of how this was “achieved” through mass civilian deaths are horrifying, and yet none of that has penetrated the consciousness of the DeBerry’s — or the pro-Israel crowd in Marin they are now actively courting. But if the DeBerry's were who they say they are, wouldn't it matter to them?

Next Week: California Water, Israeli Interests, Part II

©️2025 Eva Chrysanthe

“Teacher Notes”: there will be a very diverse gathering of educators at the West Berkeley Shellmound on June 7 starting at 11 AM. The teachers are trying to raise awareness about a variety of issues facing educators, including the disastrous anti-Free Speech Assembly Bill 715. I hope to attend and if you have any questions, please contact me and I will put you in touch with the organizers.

And Upcoming: I received a phone call last week from a legendary photographer and journalist who promised me an interview sometime in June.