Vietnamese activist Bao Ngoc makes a rare appearance in Gaza | Gaza News

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam – At the beginning of this year, the Vietnamese site was taken by the name: Tieu Nguyen Bao Ngoc.

The 28-year-old from Vietnam’s largest city, Ho Chi Minh, was said to be the first and only Vietnamese to join the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF), which sought to end the Israeli conflict in Gaza by providing maritime aid to the region.

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Two weeks before he was due to cross the Mediterranean Sea in May, Bao Ngoc, also known as Ashley, announced that he would be taking part in a tour of the war site where Israel killed more than 73,000 Palestinians.

News of his performance spread online among young Vietnamese who began following his journey closely on social media.

In a country where civil society had been defeated under the powerful Vietnamese Communist Party, Bao Ngoc emerged as a rare figure in the political spotlight: the future of Palestine under Israeli rule.

“As a Vietnamese who has endured the same pain and military violence committed by Western rulers, especially the US, I feel very sorry for the Palestinian people,” Bao Ngoc told Indonesia’s Republika Online in an interview aboard his aid ship on a trip to Gaza.

This word spread in Vietnam.

Messages of support, including digital footage of the teenager, flooded social media as Bao Ngoc’s message of solidarity with the Palestinians struck a chord with the country’s youth.

But on May 18, the live tracker of the Gaza flotilla, which many followed to plan Bao Ngoc’s journey towards Gaza, sent a warning that his ship had been seized by Israeli forces in international waters west of Cyprus.

An SOS video message recorded from Bao Ngoc was soon released on the flotilla’s website, then on Vietnamese social media, confirming that he had been abducted by Israeli forces and urging the public to call on the Vietnamese government to intervene and free him.

His followers heeded the call, flooding social media with demands to “free Bao Ngoc!”

With the outpouring of aid to Vietnam that Bao Ngoc encouraged, many expected the story to make headlines on the media.

But it didn’t.

All major media outlets in Vietnam remained silent during the two days that Bao Ngoc was arrested by Israeli forces.

The unacceptable silence from the media, as well as the Vietnamese government, stood in contrast to neighboring Malaysia and Indonesia, who responded immediately, along with many other governments, by criticizing Israel for the abduction of their citizens in international waters aboard a flotilla.

The Vietnamese began to fill in information.

Bao Ngoc’s supporters launched a massive email campaign, sending more than 2,000 requests to the Vietnamese embassy in Israel to take action to ensure the activist’s protection and release from Israeli prison.

Then it came back unexpectedly.

Vietnamese government activists protested, accusing Bao Ngoc and his pro-Palestinian advocacy of damaging Vietnam’s national identity.

Some questioned its authenticity, and when a video clip was posted on the VietForPalestine website of Bao Ngoc holding his Vietnamese passport, another conspiracy theory spread that it was created by AI.

Pro-Palestinian groups in Vietnam have also been accused of promoting anti-government sentiment for daring to write to the Vietnamese embassy in Israel to intervene to free the activist.

Vu Minh Hoang, a historian of Vietnam, said that the case against the government was made despite the fact that it is “the main responsibility of the embassy to protect all its citizens”.

Two days later, the calm was over.

The Vietnamese ambassador to Israel made a public announcement, saying that they have been working to ensure the safety of the young man and his release by Israel, along with others who have participated in the Gaza flotilla, to Istanbul in Turkey.

Vu explained that this is unprecedented in today’s Vietnam.

“I struggle to think of a similar case where a Vietnamese citizen participated in a protest abroad that demanded government action,” he told Al Jazeera.

The appeal of the Bao Ngoc case stems from Vietnam’s long history and the political maturity of young Vietnamese, said Ly Thuy Nguyen, an international activist.

Bao Ngoc and his supporters are from a younger generation of Vietnamese “who have not only experienced war, but their culture has been shaped by images of war”, Ly told Al Jazeera.

Through his actions, Bao Ngoc made the Palestinian conflict and the Gaza conflict compatible with the Vietnamese people, said Ly.

Bao Ngoc drew “a parallel between the memory of the American war in Vietnam and the genocide of the Palestinian people”, said Ly.

“Bao Ngoc turned this kind of compassion into self-sacrifice – putting his body on the line to highlight the plight of the Palestinian people – which inspires his generation, asking: What’s next?” Ly added.

A sociologist and part-time baker in Ho Chi Minh City, Bao Ngoc said he doesn’t want to be an activist.

Before she started supporting the Palestinian cause, her previous involvement was a high school animal shelter.

It was while Bao Ngoc was pursuing a master’s degree at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore that Hamas launched its attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

Israel’s devastating response to the attack changed everything for the Vietnamese student.

“I woke up on October 8 and immediately felt sad because I knew what happened to the Palestinians but I didn’t do anything to them,” he told Al Jazeera.

So he decided to do something.

The first thing he did was to leave his master’s program, dissatisfied with what he saw as NTU’s relationship with Israel.

Returning home to Vietnam, he started by organizing a bakery and launched the joint venture VietForPalestine in early 2024.

The original group grew to 22,000 followers on the Internet and produced studies on Palestine and historical cooperation between Vietnamese and Palestinians.

At first, Bao Ngoc was not known, wary of political consequences that were closely monitored by the Vietnamese people.

But this changed at the end of 2024 when Israel bombed the Al-Aqsa hospital in Gaza.

Photos of a 20-year-old Palestinian patient who was burned alive while connected to an IV drip shocked Bao Ngoc into speaking out.

“I couldn’t get that image out of my head,” he said. “Words can’t describe the anger I felt.”

He appeared publicly in VietForPalestine’s first online video, saying: “Israel has no right to defend itself, no group can. Stop the genocide now.”

His video went viral.

Bao Ngoc’s dire advice on the Israeli society attracted his followers and became a counterpoint to pro-Israel sentiments in Vietnam’s media sectors and religious and business circles, where Israel was well promoted – “Startup Nation”, dirty, smart, as the title of one popular Vietnamese-language book describes the country.

Despite the historical relationship between Vietnam and Palestine in the 1960s and 1970s, the Vietnamese government has been very hesitant to confirm the legacy amid the growth of military and economic relations with Israel since 2010, according to Evyn Le Espiritu Gandhi, who has researched Vietnam-Palestine relations since 1967.

‘Supporting Palestine is natural’

Bao Ngoc is not alone in Southeast Asia in seeing Gaza and Palestine as a war that is important to their generations and governments.

Ko Tinmaung, a Canada-based and Southeast Asian Rohingya activist who participated in the flotilla earlier this year, was born in Bangladesh after her family fled Myanmar.

Ko became politically active in 2017 after the destruction of hundreds of Rohingya villages and the displacement of 700,000 people by the Myanmar military in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Muslim minority.

Ko said “support for Palestine is natural and constant” among the Rohingya who were forced to leave their homes in Myanmar and go to refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh.

“They know what hunger in Gaza feels like because they are going through the same thing,” he told Al Jazeera.

The relationship between the Palestinians and the Rohingya is very direct, because the Myanmar military has close relations with Israel, and Israeli arms manufacturers have sold advanced weapons to the Myanmar government, according to human rights activists.

“The military regime in Myanmar is not only the enemy of the Burmese people, but also of the Palestinians,” Phil Robertson, director of Asia Human Rights and Labor Advocates, told Al Jazeera.

Indonesian journalist Bambang Noroyono, also known as “Aberg”, joined the flotilla this year.

According to Aberg, there is widespread support for the Palestinians among Indonesians, but the government of President Prabowo Subianto has pursued policies that are contrary to public opinion.

Indonesia accepted an invitation to join US President Donald Trump’s Peace Council and pledged earlier this year to send 8,000 troops to the International Stabilization Force in Gaza, which critics say could be legitimized in Gaza by foreign troops.

For Robertson, the Palestinian crisis is also linked to the future of freedom in Southeast Asia and beyond.

“If Israel can stop what it is doing in Gaza, other governments will think they can do the same to their own people,” he said.

Bao Ngoc made the statement in an interview with the Rohingya Network earlier this year.

“Our community has always been rich not only in resources, but also in our desire to fight for freedom,” he said.

“This is an opportunity for us to connect the Palestinian and Rohingya struggles with what we know in Southeast Asia and make it the basis of our struggle for freedom.”