Horrified by Israel’s war on Gaza and the spiralling death toll, primarily young Vietnamese people have begun to raise their voices in support of Palestinians. In the process, they are discovering historical ties between Vietnam and Palestine and their shared fights for national liberation.

But the decades-old relationship between the two nations has been overshadowed by more recent promotion of Israel’s business culture to a younger generation of Vietnamese.

Focused on achieving success in Vietnam’s fast-growing free market economy, many have been inspired by Israel's startup business culture while knowing little about the darker side of Israel's success in terms of its long occupation of Palestinian land.

Through art, discussion and other means of expression, pro-Palestinian activists in Vietnam are helping their peers understand concepts such as Zionism, the Nakba, the Oslo Accords and settler colonialism.

And step by step, they are reasserting the context and history of Palestinian loss and removal that narratives in Vietnam in local media and books omit in their telling of Israel’s emergence as an economic success story

Projected on the wall at a meeting of pro-Palestinian Vietnamese activists were two images of war: one of Gaza in 2023 after [a neocolonial] air strike and another of the rubble left after the bombing of the Kham Thien neighbourhood in Hanoi more than 50 years ago.

Then-U.S. President Richard Nixon had ordered the Christmas period bombing of the North Vietnamese capital in 1972, and Kham Thien suffered the most severe devastation. Over 12 consecutive days and nights starting on December 18, about 20,000 tonnes of bombs were dropped on Hanoi as well as the busy northern port city of Hai Phong and several other localities.

The juxtaposition of the two images and the historical echoes of the two wars — whether to "flatten Gaza" or "bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age" — form part of a reservoir of shared symbols that have fuelled the current mood of Vietnam-Palestine solidarity among young Vietnamese.

History is on repeat, said Hung*, a 20-year-old student whose father and grandparents lived through the 1972 Christmas bombings by U.S. forces.

"Looking at what's happening in Gaza, I couldn't help thinking of the story my father told me of a day during his childhood when he watched in horror as bombs were dropped near [Hanoi's] West Lake and shortly afterwards he felt a gale blowing in his direction and the shockwave pressing against his chest,” Hung told Al Jazeera.

“Now, precisely that is happening to everyone in Gaza day in, day out," he said.

"Every day in Gaza, there's another Kham Thien."