Ceasefire Proponents Show 35-1 at Final 2023 Marin Board of Supervisors' Meeting
Danielewicz as context for the recent JCF exposé; "AIPAC's Man in Mill Valley"; Marin I-J reporter Richard Halstead declares that he only knows about Israel from what he reads on Wikipedia
By last Tuesday's Marin County Board of Supervisors' meeting, the ceasefire proponent speakers had grown in number to 35, despite the fact that it was finals week in local schools and colleges, and many of the student leaders were unable to attend. Meanwhile, the anti-ceasefire side could summon only one speaker, who appeared facelessly via zoom. Throughout public comment period, Board President Stephanie Moulton-Peters maintained her cold, tone-deaf demeanor, limiting the peaceniks' speaking time, and dismissively scoffing at 87- year-old Jeannine Herron, who had again appeared in person to beg for a ceasefire resolution.
Amid this scene, one of the more cautious men in the County, Attorney Larry Bragman, oft-embattled for doing the right thing on the County's water district board, stepped to the podium. What was this County insider doing here? What would he say?
Bragman introduced himself humbly, and spoke plainly: "I was bar mitzvah’d in 1967 in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. And I remember the jubilation that David had defeated Goliath. 56 years later, the war never ended, and David has turned into Goliath. What's going on now is not self-defense. It's vengeance driven by anger and grief, and we here in the protected quarters of Marin County and the United States need to break the silence, because at some point silence is complicity. And I would ask you to take up the resolution. I thank you for the platform you've given the citizens to bring it to you, but at some point we've got to act. We've got to speak out or else we're complicit."
In Marin, there's a considerable difference between a group of regular citizens pleading their case and a man who is inarguably a leader in the community, repeatedly elected to various local seats, urging action on any issue, and particularly on this one. One wonders if it is a signal that the tide has turned.
The only person who spoke against the ceasefire that day was Laurie Dubin, the same ONDCP*-funded nonprofit director who pushed the dubiously sourced Golda Meir quote about the alleged necessity of killing children at the previous week's meeting. Ostensibly to cover for the low anti-ceasefire turnout, Dubin claimed that her group had decided against speaking in public. It seems more likely that the anti-ceasefire group realizes at this stage of the genocide, with over 8,000 children killed by Israeli bombs, with the IDF shooting even Israeli hostages, that every time they speak against a ceasefire resolution, they are further alienating themselves from the rest of the world.
I don't think many of the younger people who were able to attend the meeting recognized who Larry Bragman is. But Bragman's words were an echo of the concerns of so many younger people in the County. And in all of their voices, in varying degrees, I could almost hear it: a whisper of Sigismund Danielewicz, the hardworking Jewish activist boo’ed out of a Bay Area meeting over 100 years ago for speaking up for the persecuted Chinese workers, the "other" laborers whom many of the powerful businessmen in Pacific Heights and atop Nob Hill wanted to eliminate. I respectfully propose the mostly forgotten Danielewicz should be considered in the context of a recent Nation Magazine article about San Francisco’s Jewish Community Federation as a funding vehicle for the rightwing Israeli doxxing project, Canary Mission.
Meet Mr. Danielewicz
Sigismund Danielewicz was born in what was then known as Congress Poland, and arrived in San Francisco in the late 1870s. He would become a radical organizer in 19th century California and in Hawaii — one of many Jewish Americans who devoted themelves to labor organizing, often at great cost to their own lives. In San Francisco, Danielewicz took a lonely stand, both against his own labor union and against the leadership of San Francisco's Jewish community, to defend Chinese workers from violent persecution.
As Lehrhaus Judaica Founder and Director Fred Rosenbaum has chronicled, Jewish leadership in San Francisco was distinct not only because it was wealthier and more assimilated than other Jewish communities in the US, but also because its anti-Chinese activism and its promotion of the Chinese Exclusion Act was so severe that it drew the ire of the rest of American Jewish leadership. This occurred after decades of anti-Chinese sentiment that resulted in pogroms, raids, and persecution so severe against Chinese communities in California that in at least one Bay Area city, Chinese were forced to build underground tunnels in order to survive.
Danielewicz's defense of Chinese workers had allyship with many other Jewish leaders outside of San Francisco, who unfortunately carried no more weight in California than he did. In his book, Cosmopolitans**, Rosenbaum quotes a description of Danielewicz' impassioned speech to the Coast Seaman's Union, which he himself had helped establish: "He (Danielewicz) said he belonged to a race persecuted for hundreds of years and was still persecuted – the Jews; and he called upon his people to consider whether the persecution of the Chinese was more justifiable than theirs had been. And he left it upon the Irish to say whether it was more justifiable than their persecution in New York had been; upon the Germans to make a similar comparison."
Danielewicz was boo’ed from the stage. Meanwhile, East Coast Jewish establishment figures who wrote plaintive letters to San Francisco's Jewish leaders had no better luck on this issue. As Rosenbaum describes it:
"...a Jewish editor in New York, comparing anti-Chinese hysteria with Russian pogroms, accused his San Francisco counterparts of the same complicity as the St. Petersburg journalists who defended the Czar's bloody policies. Beyond the moral question, the East Coast Jewish press worried that anti-Chinese sentiment could result in demands to curtail Jewish immigration just when Russian Jews were arriving in America in large numbers. 'The Chinese today; why not the Jews of tomorrow!' Yet none of this swayed Jewish opinion makers, who, to the dismay of the rest of American Jewry, remained 'unrepentant.'"***
Danielewicz and the East Coast Jewish leadership were entirely correct: the rationale for the Chinese Exclusion Act and its extensions would later be used to implement the exclusionary Immigration Act of 1924, which trapped countless Eastern European Jews in the decades leading up to (and including) the Holocaust. Clearly, there was a distinction between how workingclass/non-elite Jewish leadership viewed their collective plight, and how the Pacific Heights Jewish leadership viewed it.
But if the Pacific Heights crew had known that their promotion of the Chinese Exclusion Act would later result in blocking Eastern European Jews from finding refuge in the US, would they have acted differently? There has always been a divide in every community, about who is "acceptable" and who is "expendable." Poorer Eastern European Jews were too often viewed as a heavy burden by German and Austrian Jews who had worked hard to establish a prosperous and influential community in San Francisco.
The Origins of the JCF and the Ha’aretz/Nation Exposés
One of the major Jewish charities funded by San Francisco's Jewish leadership in Danielewicz' era was the Eureka Benevolent Fund, which, after many iterations, is now The Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund. This is the 501c3 that was identified two days ago in a Nation Magazine article as having served as a questionably legal transfer point between at least one billionaire San Francisco family (the Dillers, in this case) and something called "Canary Mission", an Israeli doxxing operation targeting anti-Zionist academics and students. The Nation articles builds on earlier reporting in Ha’aretz.
Several of the academics were detained and deported as a result of the doxxing, others “merely” lost their jobs. And who are some of Canary Mission's major targets? Jewish Americans, of course. Again, as in so many other communities, it goes back to who is "acceptable" within any community and who is "expendable".
But beyond that, Diller and the JCF were also potentially breaking the law (not that it matters when you're a billionaire.) As James Bamford outlines in The Nation:
"Those Americans who were financially supporting Canary Mission were potentially committing a serious crime, acting as agents of a foreign power. They were financing a clandestine foreign organization with ties to Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs, an Israeli intelligence angecy — which was using Canary Mission to identify, detain and deport Americans entering the country...."
But as if that were not bad enough, the donors wanted tax breaks for breaking the law:
"Not content to secretly fund Canary Mission to carry out its spying and intimidation on American college campuses, many of the wealthy donors also wanted generous federal tax breaks for their donation. The problem was that tax breaks are not allowed for donations to foreign charities, just those in the United States, and Megamot Shalom’s being in Israel would rule out the deduction. To solve the problem, years ago a family living in Israel’s illegal settlements came to the United States and set up shop in New York City as a nonprofit “charity,” calling itself the Central Fund of Israel. Therefore, the Diller family, through San Francisco’s Jewish Community Federation, actually “donated” their money to the Central Fund in New York, and in return received a substantial tax rebate. And then the Central Fund simply transferred the money to Megamot Shalom’s bank account in Israel. Under the scheme, billionaires and their foundations got richer while American taxpayers subsidized the blacklisting and terrorizing of their own children in college.”
Coincidentally, who is the former Marketing Director for the JCF, the 501c3 that was involved in possible illegally financing this "clandestine foreign organization"?
Why, that would be Jeff Saperstein, who on Thursday finally returned a fact-checking phone call I made weeks ago.
Saperstein, the Outsider:
Despite his two years as the JCF's Marketing Director, Saperstein, an ex-New Yorker, carries the whiff of an outsider trying to claw his way into the sweet center of the kind of Bay Area Jewish culture defined by families that long preceded his arrival. The effort seems partly in vain; it is a version of Jewish culture increasingly abandoned by a younger generation of Jewish Americans. If Saperstein ever makes it past that velvet rope, the party may be over, the canapés wilted.
Saperstein's seeming desperation to be included with the big boys was confirmed by his nearly-immediate declaration to me during our phone call that he's "been an advocate with AIPAC for many many years." When I asked him in what capacity he worked with AIPAC, he conceded that it's only been as a volunteer. But Saperstein said he also serves as co-Chair at Congregation Khol Shafar in Tiburon, where they have an "Israel Affairs Committee that is involved with the Supervisors, the mayors and a lot of activity." Much of this is coordinated, per Saperstein, by the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC).
Saperstein insisted that "There's no other issue that has gotten this kind of vituperation," a word he continued to use throughout the conversation with a dramatic flair that recalled a certain Chuck Jones creation. Was this really the best AIPAC could muster?
Saperstein's plaint was an echo of his statement at the December 5 Board of Supervisors' meeting that there was no equivalent outrage about Syria or China. But it has been repeatedly pointed out to Mr. Saperstein that the criticism of Israel's actions by ceasefire proponents, many of whom are Jewish, is made more urgent because it is US tax dollars that fund the genocidal killing of Palestinian civilians by Israel. Despite this, Saperstein repeatedly demanded that I identify an issue that had so riled the public as the current situation in Gaza. It was too obvious to name Vietnam, so I identified the massive (although under-reported) protests that accompanied the invasion of Iraq in 2003. (Tragically, the Iraq invasion had real parallels to what Israel is now engaged in, a matter frequently mentioned by older ceasefire proponents.)
Saperstein countered that the invasion of Iraq was in response to 9/11, which he repeatedly maintained was an act of domestic terror because it occurred in the US. But that is not how domestic terrorism is defined.
Saperstein subsequently maintained that Israel has killed 7,000 Hamas militants, citing data from the IDF. There are obvious problems with this claim, not least of which is that the IDF has a documented history of fabrications. When I pointed that out, Saperstein snarlingly insisted that I should stop listening to "Joy Reid and Medhi Hasan" (I do not have cable or even a television, and thus I listen to neither, but I did cite a Financial Times article on the impacts of Israel’s bombing campaign that Saperstein seemed utterly disinterested in.) Saperstein insisted that I should instead listen to David Petraeus and "military men". I again politely pointed out that the IDF, which he had cited, had been largely discredited, and that David Petraeus had also been discredited years ago when he had lost his position, whereupon Saperstein announced, "This conversation is over!" at which point I thanked him and wished him well.
How can AIPAC be so sloppy as to promote such irrational talking points through its volunteers? Saperstein stood a better chance of convincing me than he stood to convince any number of young Jewish Americans of his position, but even I recognized his arguments as ridiculous, and his demeanor bullying.
Is the paucity of the pro-Israel argument the reason why Canary Mission is targeting even Jewish Americans?
Wikipedia Man
Richard Halstead was pacing the halls of Marin Civic Center at lunchtime last Tuesday, and despite being still out of breath from the bike ride from the East Bay, I joined him in his perambulations through the stuffy Frank Lloyd Wright building. For seventeen minutes, we had one of our usual light-hearted conversations in which he repeatedly complained that I had "mischaracterized" his publication's partnership with the County, and when I asked him to explain what, specifically, I had mischaracterized, he was unable to specify anything. Real rom-com material.
Halstead had some other things to say — in the interest of time, I list them here in the order they were stated, so there is at least a record of how Marin County’s news media operates:
1. Halstead stated that he did not keep a count of the pro- and anti-ceasefire petitioners at BoS. Neither did Halstead explain his prior assertion that he agreed with his editors' decision not to cover the ceasefire resolution crowds because he did not see either side as possessing the "moral high ground."
2. Halstead stated that because the BoS has not agendized any ceasefire resolution, the I-J will not cover it.
3. When asked whether he had any thoughts on the October 18 opinion piece that Alden Global Capital required all of its publications (including the I-J) to carry about the October 7 attacks, Halstead conceded that he had not actually read the opinion piece. (That in itself is an astounding admission. The mandated opinion piece was considered newsworthy enough to be covered by Axios.)
4. Halstead claimed that the Israel-Palestine issue was complicated, and asked what I had read. I brought up Rashid Khalidi's best-selling recent history, and Halstead indicated that he was not aware of it. He also indicated that he was unaware of Israeli historian Benny Morris, Israeli scholar Raz Segal, and Jewish American professor Shaul Magid.
5. Halstead then stated that he had only given the larger historical context a "cursory look", referencing what he had seen on "wikipedia." He claimed there was nothing wrong with this lack of background, since he is not covering the Middle East. It is true that Halstead is not covering the Middle East, but it is also damning of The Marin Independent-Journal that their reporter publicly states that his only information about a major geopolitical issue which reverberates on many local issues is limited to Wikipedia.
6. Halstead dismissed the significance of the recent UN General Assembly vote for a ceasefire, claiming that people can vote for all sorts of reasons at the UN. (Okay, but the vote was 153-10?) Halstead then also dismissed the stark ratio for that UN vote.
7. I asked Halstead how, on the one hand, he could so easily dismiss the UN vote when he was so adamant that the mere ceasefire petition could not be covered because it had not yet been agendized. In other words, procedure matters when it pleases Halstead, but it does not matter when it does not please Halstead.
8. Halstead's response was to build a bizarre "philosophical" argument wherein it was too difficult to distinguish between one death on one side and 100 deaths on the other side. Halstead's statement was monstrous; 20,000 Palestinians aren't 100. It is the rate and number of slaughtered civilians that has drawn the global protests, and even condemnation from the stuffy Financial Times.
9. Halstead then claimed that the current rate of killing is only a genocide by my definition. When I brought up Israeli scholar's Raz Segal's assertion that the Israeli assault on Palestinians in Gaza is "a textbook case of genocide", Halstead dismissed it.
10. Halstead dismissed the Israel-Palestine issue as a "Chinese puzzle." This expression is an anachronism that is not only without any meaning in today's world, but its definition doesn't even apply to the situation in Israel/Palestine. (But it does suggest that Halstead, who lives in Berkeley, which itself has a very large Asian population, is apparently so isolated from Asian neighbors that he does not understand how anachronistic his speech is.)
11. Halstead inexplicably blew up at me because I hadn't made public comment on SB 43 item at Board of Supervisors, even though I am in no way required to comment on every item, and even though the item itself was simply delaying implementation of SB 43.
12. Halstead claimed that his publishers told him I had mischaracterized the relationship between the Marin I-J and the County of Marin, even though County Public Health Officer Matt Willis announced the official partnership at the March 28, 2023 Board of Supervisors' meeting. I repeatedly asked Halstead what, specifically, I had mischaracterized and he could not answer.
13. Halstead claimed that I was "crying wolf all the time" and said that "people aren't paying attention to what you have to say", but this seems a clear attempt to distract from the reality that I have repeatedly scooped Halstead on stories that he should have reported himself, whether it's the 32-year record of severe racial arrest disparities in the County; the County's complicity in abuses against the unhoused population in San Rafael; or the serious conflicts of interest on the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Working Group; among many others.
14. Halstead then said about the County's relationship with the Marin I-J, "My general impression is that we're doing some public service work to discourage the drug use and, uh, to try to keep people from OD'ing, but if you're against that, Eva, I'm sorry. If you want to see people die of drug death, well, then, that's great."
15. I replied that my still-unanswered question remains: "What is the financial relationship between the Marin I-J and the County of Marin?" Halstead responded: "We have no financial relationship," and then he amended that to:,"that I know of." I replied, "That you know of? But did you ask?"
16. Halstead then claimed that he did not have to ask because he didn't have a credible person making the assertion that such a relationship exists. But Halstead continues to ignore the fact that it is in fact "a credible person", Matt Willis, who made the assertion in the first place. Is Halstead implying that Matt Willis, the County's Public Health Officer, is not credible?
17. Halstead suggested that the partnership Willis announced may simply be a matter of running ads. But he did not state at any point that the partnership restricts "sponsored content".
18. When I pressed him on that matter, Halstead's only response was, "How do you sustain yourself? Do you have a trust fund?" (For the record, I do not.) I note that this is not an answer to the question, it is a distraction from the relevant and valid question about the County/I-J partnership and "sponsored content" that I have been asking for months.
19. Halstead then angrily accused me, repeatedly jabbing his finger toward my face, of profiting from this substack account by writing untrue allegations about his employer, The Marin Independent-Journal. (For the record, although some people have signed up for paid subscriptions to my substack, I have not yet accepted any of the monies.)
20. I asked Halstead to name a single untrue allegation I had ever made about The Marin Independent-Journal. He abruptly ended the conversation, saying, "I have to go to work now."
But what does Halstead ever actually do when he is “at work” in his Civic Center office? In a little more than a week, it will be 2024, a critical election year locally and nationally. And there is no more transparency either from the County or its partnered "news" media publications than before. For those of us who are still pursuing answers from the County, it looks to be a busy year. Fasten your seatbelts…
@2023 Eva Chrysanthe
*Notes:
*Office of National Drug Control Policy, known colloquially as the "Drug Czar"
**The full title is: Cosmopolitans: A Social and Cultural History of the Jews of the San Francisco Bay Area, UC Press, 2009.
***This was a popular position amongst Bay Area power brokers regardless of religion: One of Marin County's most revered local Supervisors, the late Charles McGlashan, was heir to a fortune made off the anti-Chinese activity of his forebear, Charles Fayette McGlashan, who developed "the Truckee Method" of vigilante action against Chinese laborers in California. (Another McGlashan, apparently Charles' brother, is Bill McGlashan Sr., who made a separate fortune through the Nixon administration with a method for drug-"testing" GI's in Vietnam, with the predictable result of reduction of individual GI benefits, particularly for Black GI's whom the testing process targeted.)