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On June 29, at the headquarters of Israel’s Ministry of Economy and Industry in Jerusalem, Vietnamese Ambassador to Israel, Nguyen Ky Son met with Israeli Economy Minister, Nir Barkat to strengthen the implementation of the Vietnam–Israel Free Trade Agreement (VIFTA). A meeting that is difficult to reconcile with the fact that, just four days earlier, Communist Party General Secretary and President To Lam had reaffirmed Vietnam’s unwavering support for the Palestinian people’s struggle during a meeting with the Palestinian ambassador to Vietnam, Saadi Salama.
This contradiction exposes the Vietnamese government’s hypocrisy, caught between hollow declarations of support for the Palestinian cause and its concrete ties with imperialism and Israel. The Jerusalem meeting underscored the continued expansion of economic relations between the two countries — a trend that is far from new. Bilateral trade reached $1.6 billion during the first five months of 2026, including $462 million in Vietnamese exports to Israel.
Military Relations Between Israel and Vietnam
Faced with persistent maritime tensions with China in the South China Sea, Vietnam has spent several years building an extensive network of strategic partners. Within this framework, cooperation between Israel’s defense industry and Vietnam, as well as with other Asia-Pacific countries, has continued to deepen, particularly as growing Western arms embargoes against Israel have emerged in response to its recent wars. For example, Italy did not renew its defense agreement with Israel and allegedly suspended arms deliveries following the Blocchiamo Tutto movement, which gained momentum in the autumn of 2025 when two million people took to the streets demanding wage increases, opposing rearmament, and calling for an end to complicity in the genocide in Palestine.
Vietnam now maintains particularly extensive military cooperation with Israel, to the point that Israel has gradually become Vietnam’s second-largest arms supplier after Russia.
From Israel’s perspective, military exports are a direct byproduct of the country’s permanent wars in the Middle East, enabling it to pair its diplomacy with profits worth billions of dollars. In 2025, Israeli military exports reached a record $19.2 billion, of which $6.1 billion came from purchases by countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
Cooperation between the two states has taken shape through a series of major agreements in the defense and industrial sectors. Among them is a $250 million contract signed with the Israeli state-owned company Rafael Advanced Defence Systems to acquire and locally manufacture Spike Firefly loitering munitions, which have been used by the Israeli military in Gaza.
In addition, an agreement was signed between the Israeli company 4Model and the Vietnamese firm Dong Nam to provide solutions for precision chip processing and the manufacture of complex components.
Hanoi has also acquired Israeli missile systems, Heron surveillance drones, and the SPYDER air defense system.
Vietnam Won, so will Palestine
Beyond this commercial partnership, ties between Vietnam and Israel have recently been strengthened by the Vietnamese government’s decision to join the so-called Gaza Peace Council, after participating in the signing ceremony of its founding charter earlier this year.
Designed by Donald Trump and his close allies, this colonial project seeks to exclude Palestinian organizations from the governance of Gaza and ultimately place the Palestinian enclave under Arab military occupation and a technocratic government serving imperialist interests, thereby facilitating the continuation of the ongoing genocide.
Although the Communist Party of Vietnam maintains the appearance of supporting the Palestinian people’s just struggle, the numerous military and commercial agreements it has concluded with Israel expose the hypocrisy of these declarations.
This situation is particularly appalling given the historical parallels between the Vietnamese and Palestinian national movements, both of which stood as symbols of the anti-imperialist struggle throughout the Cold War.
Even today, the Vietnamese Revolution remains a source of inspiration for the generation fighting against the genocide in Gaza.
In the face of the Communist Party of Vietnam’s hypocrisy, the only response for workers, students, and pro-Palestinian activists must be to build an independent mass movement demanding the liberation of Palestine and the complete termination of all military and economic partnerships between Vietnam and Israel.
Like workers throughout Asia, the Vietnamese people have no interest in supporting a government that collaborates with a state currently carrying out a genocide that has already claimed the lives of more than 70,000 Palestinians.
This article was first published in French at Revolution Permanente on July 18, 2026.
The post Vietnam’s Government Deepens Its Ties with Israel appeared first on Left Voice.