The Aloha state is nearly 9,000 miles from Israel, but Tina Nakada Grandinetti, a housing policy researcher who is running to be a state representative in Hawaii’s 20th District, accused the Jewish state of war crimes in a post on Oct. 14.
“It’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the genocide against Palestinians continues,” the Democrat wrote. “When I was 22 years old, I spent an eye-opening couple of months in Palestine. Among so many other lessons, my friends in the West Bank taught me the phrase ‘our existence is resistance.’” (The Biden administration, and some states and global bodies, refers to Judea and Samaria as the “West Bank.”)
As a proud Uchinanchu—a community of Okinawans in Hawaii—”I’ve carried that reminder with me every day,” she continued. “Nothing is a greater challenge to colonialism and imperialism than the persistence of indigenous people, the perpetuation of our cultures and the deepening of our solidarity with each other.”
“From Hawaii to Okinawa, from Turtle Island to Palestine, another world is possible, and we are building it together,” Grandinetti said, using a progressive term for North America. “Free Palestine.”
Corinne Solomon, a Jewish Republican running against Grandinetti, told JNS there has been a rise in Jew-hatred in Hawaii since Oct. 7.
“Native Hawaiians have a painful history post-outsider contact, with today’s Native Hawaiian struggles blamed on settler colonialism,” she said. “The local anti-settler colonialism activists have adopted anti-Zionism-antisemitism, which, to them, is a logical progression as they see the conflict between Israel and Gaza as ‘Jews are settler colonists’ versus Palestinians, who are the indigenous victims.”
There have been “free Palestine” and “stop the genocide in Gaza” rallies in the state, as in others across the country. And, according to Solomon, a “rabid antisemite” professor teaches at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and leads a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter.
“Jewish students at UH Manoa have reported being harassed over their identity,” she told JNS. “SJP has organized Palestine rallies in Hawaii since October 2023.”
Hawaiians in the state’s 20th District should know that a vote for Grandinetti is one “for a radical Socialist who supports a terror organization, and, if elected, will be Hawaii’s next AOC or Cori Bush-type Hamas ‘Squad’ member,” she said. (JNS sought comment from Grandinetti.)
‘A strong pull towards Judaism’
Solomon, who was raised by secular parents and a Catholic grandmother, had almost no exposure to Judaism growing up. There were only two Jewish students that she knew in elementary and high school, she told JNS.
She decided to convert to Judaism in her early 30s before she met her Jewish husband. “I felt a strong pull towards Judaism since my teens—never could really explain it,” she said.
When she moved to Hawaii in 2004 for an internship, she visited Temple Emanu-El, a Reform synagogue in Honolulu, to meet the rabbi and discuss converting, a process she began in 2005. (She recently learned that the rabbi died.)
She hopes at some point to undergo an Orthodox conversion, she told JNS.
“I used to be a pretty liberal Democrat, and we belonged to the Reform temple,” she told JNS, of her and her husband. “But I’ve become much more conservative in the last eight years or so.”
Her father was born and raised in Algeria, and he and his family left in 1962 after the war in which Algeria gained its independence from France. “I’ve heard about colonialism, but from the other perspective, my whole life,” she told JNS.
“Israel is important to me as the ancestral—both physical and spiritual—homeland of the Jewish people, an ally to the United States and a beacon of democracy in the Middle East,” Solomon told JNS.
“By publicly accusing Israel of genocide, this spreads the blood libel against Jews that they are bloodthirsty indiscriminate killers and thus fosters antisemitism,” she said, noting that the keffiyeh, in which her opponent poses, “is the modern-day equivalent of a swastika.”
Solomon told JNS that an estimated 7,000 Jews live in Hawaii out of about 1.4 million people. There aren’t many Jews in the 20th state district, she said. (The district has about 27,000 people, per the state’s website.)
Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, a Democrat and a physician, is Jewish, as is Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii).
“The voters here that are concerned with the Middle East are the younger voters,” Solomon told JNS. “Voters in my district are concerned with the exorbitant cost of living, crime and homelessness, which is what I focus on in my campaign.”
