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Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam – Earlier this year, Vietnamese social media was overtaken by a name: Tieu Nguyen Bao Ngoc.
The ۲۸-year-old from Vietnam’s largest city, Ho Chi Minh, was said to be the first and only Vietnamese national to have joined the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF), which sought to break Israel’s siege of Gaza by delivering aid to the territory by sea.
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Two weeks before setting sail across the Mediterranean in May, Bao Ngoc, also known as Ashley, had announced her participation in the mission to reach the war-torn enclave where Israel has killed more than ۷۳,۰۰۰ Palestinians.
News of her exploit circulated online among young Vietnamese who began to closely follow her journey on social media.
In a country where civil society has remained subdued beneath that powerful Vietnamese Communist Party, Bao Ngoc emerged as a rare figure to achieve public visibility on a political matter: the fate of Palestinians under Israel’s occupation.
“As a Vietnamese who has endured the same sufferings and war crimes committed by Western imperialists, especially the US, I feel tremendous sympathy for the Palestinian people,” Bao Ngoc told Indonesia’s Republika Online in an interview from aboard her aid vessel during the voyage to reach Gaza.
Those words went viral in Vietnam.
Messages of support, including digital artwork featuring the young activist, flooded social media platforms as Bao Ngoc’s message of solidarity with Palestinians struck a chord among young people in the country.
But on May ۱۸, the Gaza flotilla live tracker, which many had followed to chart Bao Ngoc journey towards Gaza, sent an alert that her vessel had been intercepted by Israeli forces in international waters west of Cyprus.
A prerecorded SOS video message from Bao Ngoc was released shortly afterwards on the flotilla’s website, and then on Vietnamese social media, confirming that she had been abducted by Israeli forces and urging people to call on the Vietnamese government to intervene and get her released.
Her supporters heeded the call, flooding social media with the demand to “release Bao Ngoc!”
With the outpouring of support in Vietnam that Bao Ngoc had inspired, many expected that the episode would make headlines in the local media.
But it didn’t.
All major media outlets in Vietnam remained silent during Bao Ngoc’s two days of detention by Israeli forces.
The unofficial silence from the media, as well as the Vietnamese government, stood in contrast with that of neighbouring Malaysia and Indonesia, which immediately responded, along with many other governments, by condemning Israel for the abduction of their citizens while in international waters aboard the flotilla.
Vietnam’s public began to fill the information vacuum.
Bao Ngoc’s supporters launched a mass email campaign, sending more than ۲,۰۰۰ petitions to the Vietnamese embassy in Israel demanding that it take action to ensure the activist’s safety and release from Israeli detention.
Then an unexpected backlash followed.
Pro-government influencers in Vietnam weighed in, accusing Bao Ngoc and her pro-Palestine activism of harming Vietnam’s national image.
Some questioned the authenticity of her nationality, and when another prerecorded video was posted on the site VietForPalestine of Bao Ngoc holding her official Vietnamese passport, another conspiracy theory circulated that it was AI-generated.
Local pro-Palestine groups in Vietnam were also accused of promoting antigovernment sentiments for daring to file a petition to the Vietnamese embassy in Israel seeking its intervention to free the activist.
Vu Minh Hoang, a historian of diplomacy in Vietnam, said the accusation of antigovernment activity was made despite it being “the basic responsibility of the embassy to protect all of its citizens”.
After two days, the silence was broken.
Vietnam’s diplomatic mission to Israel issued a public statement, stating that it had been working to ensure the young activist’s safety and her release by Israel, along with other Gaza flotilla participants, to Istanbul in neighbouring Turkiye.
Vu described the incident as unprecedented in contemporary Vietnam.
“I struggle to think of a similar case when a Vietnamese citizen participated in activism abroad that required government intervention,” he told Al Jazeera.
The appeal of Bao Ngoc’s case stems from Vietnam’s own historical memory and the political maturation of younger Vietnamese, said Ly Thuy Nguyen, a scholar of transnational activism.
Bao Ngoc and her supporters hail from a younger generation of Vietnamese “which didn’t experience war firsthand, but whose cultural identity was shaped by the imageries of war”, Ly told Al Jazeera.
Through her actions, Bao Ngoc made the Palestinian struggle and the war on Gaza relatable to everyday Vietnamese people, Ly said.
Bao Ngoc drew “parallels between memories of America’s war in Vietnam and the genocide against Palestinians”, Ly said.
“Bao Ngoc transformed such general sympathy to a specific commitment – putting her body on the line to bring attention to the plights of Palestinians – that inspires her generation, and poses the question: What next is to be done?” Ly added.
A student of sociology and part-time baker in Ho Chi Minh City, Bao Ngoc said she never intended to become an activist.
Before her support for the Palestinian cause, her only previous involvement in activism had been running 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 October ۷, ۲۰۲۳ attacks on southern Israel.
Israel’s devastating response to the attack changed everything for the Vietnamese student.
“I woke up on October ۸ and was immediately overcome by regret, because I had been aware of the Palestinian cause but didn’t do anything for them,” she told Al Jazeera.
So, she decided to act.
The first thing she did was drop out of her master’s programme, dissatisfied with what she saw as NTU’s ties with Israel.
Returning home to Vietnam, she started by organising fundraising bake sales and co-founding the solidarity group VietForPalestine in early ۲۰۲۴.
The grassroots group grew to more than ۲۲,۰۰۰ followers online and produced educational content on Palestine and the historical solidarity between the Vietnamese and Palestinian people.
Initially, Bao Ngoc remained anonymous, wary of the consequences for political activism in strictly monitored Vietnamese society.
But that changed in late ۲۰۲۴ after Israel bombed the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza.
Footage of a ۲۰-year-old Palestinian patient burned alive while connected to an IV drip shocked Bao Ngoc into making public statements.
“I couldn’t get that image out of my head,” she said. “Words cannot express the rage I felt.”
She appeared publicly in VietForPalestine’s first online video, declaring: “Israel has no right to defend itself, no occupation force does. End the genocide now.”
Her video went viral.
Bao Ngoc’s fiery public admonishments of Israel drew followers and became a counterweight to pro-Israel sentiments in sections of Vietnam’s media and religious and business communities, where Israel has been promoted as a success – a scrappy, smart “Startup Nation”, as the title of one popular Vietnamese-language book describes the country.
Despite the historical solidarity between Vietnam and Palestine during the ۱۹۶۰s and ۱۹۷۰s, the current government of Vietnam has been increasingly hesitant to uphold that legacy amid expanding military and economic ties with Israel since ۲۰۱۰, according to Evyn Le Espiritu Gandhi, who has researched Vietnam-Palestine relations from ۱۹۶۷ to ۱۹۷۵.
‘Support for Palestine is natural’
Bao Ngoc is not alone in the Southeast Asia region in seeing Gaza and Palestine as a struggle that matters for their generation and for their governments.
Ko Tinmaung, a Rohingya activist based in Canada and also a Southeast Asian participant in the flotilla earlier this year, was born in exile in Bangladesh after his family fled Myanmar.
Ko became politically active in ۲۰۱۷ following the destruction of hundreds of Rohingya villages and the displacement of ۷۰۰,۰۰۰ people by Myanmar’s military in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Muslim minority.
Ko said “support for Palestine is natural and unrelenting” among the Rohingya forced from their homes in Myanmar and into refugee camps in neighbouring Bangladesh.
“They know what starvation in Gaza feels like because they are experiencing similar conditions,” he told Al Jazeera.
The connection between Palestinians and the Rohingya is even more direct, given that Myanmar’s military has a traditionally close relationship with Israel, and Israeli weapons makers have sold advanced arms to the Myanmar regime, according to rights workers.
“The military regime in Myanmar is not only an 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, aka “Aberg”, also joined the flotilla this year.
According to Aberg, there is widespread support for Palestinians among the Indonesian public, but the government of President Prabowo Subianto has pursued policies contradictory to the public sentiment.
Indonesia accepted an invitation to join US President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace and had pledged earlier this year to send ۸,۰۰۰ troops to be part of the board’s International Stabilization Force in Gaza, a move critics have argued could legitimise the occupation of Gaza by foreign forces.
For Robertson, the plight of the Palestinians is also connected to the future of rights in Southeast Asia and beyond.
“If Israel can get away with what they do in Gaza, other governments will think they can get away with doing the same thing to their own people,” he said.
Bao Ngoc captured that sentiment in an interview with the Rohingya Network activist platform earlier this year.
“Our region has always been rich not only in resources, but also in our will to fight for liberation,” she said.
“This is an opportunity for us to connect the Palestinian and Rohingya struggles to our Southeast Asian identity and make it the centre point of our fights for liberation.”
