Heading in a north-easterly direction from the Arc de Triomphe down Avenue Hoch to number 37, one reaches Le Royal Monceau hotel; at its entrance, a red portico and statued heads that cast their gaze over everyone who passes through.
The hotel, once a beehive of activity for diplomats, intellectuals, artists, celebrities, and even the commanders of the Allied Armed forces during World War II, in 1946 hosted one of the more curious chance meetings between two political luminaries of the 20th century.
Fresh from Black Saturday – the arrest of 3,000 Jews, including most of the Zionist executive leadership across Palestine – and the sealing of Jewish Agency buildings on June 28, David Ben-Gurion, then-leader of the Jewish Agency, sat in his hotel room pondering his organization’s next move.
Paris, in the early post-war years, was the European center of Zionist activity. While in the city, Ben-Gurion was helping to coordinate the westward migration of Jews who had survived the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, Jews he had hoped would be interested in emigrating to Palestine to help found a new Jewish state.
Staying on the floor above Ben-Gurion at Le Royal Monceau was a skinny gentleman with the elliptical eyes distinct to natives of Indochina, his hairline receding, and a thin, wispy goatee resting on his chin. To his family, growing up, he was known as Nguyễn Sinh Cung, but by 1946, he was the prime minister of the newly-found Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and known to the rest of the world as Ho Chi Minh.
That summer, Ho Chi Minh was in Paris for follow-up talks surrounding Vietnamese independence from the French. Although captured by the Japanese during WWII, French Indochina had long been a colonial jewel in the French empire’s crown with important natural and strategic resources, its prominent location close to China and other trade routes.
Ben-Gurion related to former Maariv correspondent Shmuel Segev, who would write a book on Vietnam, that each day for two weeks, Ho Chi Minh would come down to his room or he would climb a flight of stairs to the Vietnamese leader’s quarters, and the two would talk.
During one conversation, Ben-Gurion shared insights into his ongoing problems, prompting Ho Chi Minh to suggest the establishment of a Jewish government in North Vietnam.
“He gave the impression of being a nice man,” Ben-Gurion would later recall of Ho Chi Minh.
“During one of those conversations, he proposed that I immediately establish a Jewish government-in-exile on Vietnamese territory. I thanked him and said that when the time came, I would consider his offer.”
Despite sharing a roof, and becoming “very friendly” over the weeks as the former Israeli prime minister stated, “for obvious reasons, [the offer] was unacceptable.”
“I am certain that we shall be able to establish a Jewish government in Palestine,” Ben-Gurion reportedly said, adding that if he wrote to Ho Chi Minh, the latter might invite him to visit North Vietnam.
“He didn’t use Communist slogans,” Ben-Gurion said, adding that Ho Chi Minh desired to give the impression that he was a nationalist leader fighting only for his people’s independence.
Ben-Gurion also related how he had been able to judge how the Vietnamese negotiations were proceeding with the French by the length of the red carpet at Ho Chi Minh’s door.
“At first, the red carpet extended from the street to HoChi Minh’s door,” the Jewish leader recalled. “In stages, it was removed from the pavement outside, the lobby, and the staircase.
“When the carpet outside his door was removed, I knew the talks had failed, and sure enough, a few hours later, he came to my room to say goodbye. He was tired, worn out, and disappointed, and he told me nothing remained but to fight.”A few months later, the First Indochina War began between Vietnamese forces and France.
Two roads to independence
DESPITE THE close relationship developed over only a couple of weeks one Paris summer, diplomatic relations between Vietnam and Israel took decades to come to fruition.
On Friday, May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion stood in Tel Aviv and formally declared the independent State of Israel. The next day, the Arab armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq invaded, along with a corps of volunteers from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Yemen. The burgeoning Jewish State prevailed, although it would face many more obstacles down the road for its freedom.
The fight for Vietnamese independence would take a much darker and longer path.
While Vietnam was formally partitioned into South and North Vietnam in 1954, at the end of the First Indochina War, with Israel supporting the Geneva Agreements, diplomatic relations between the two nations never materialized.
Communist North Vietnam maintained a strong relationship with the socialist powers of the day, the Soviet Union and Maoist China, while also cultivating ties with the Arab nations. Israel, on the other side of the metaphorical global Iron Curtain, provided technical aid to South Vietnam without establishing formal diplomatic channels.
In June 1967, as Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, North Vietnam’s President Ho Chi Minh wrote in a personal wire to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, “We are highly indignant at the action of Israeli reactionary agents of the United States and British imperialists. They are doomed to ignominious defeat.”
By 1967, the North Vietnamese and their communist army, the Viet Cong, were busy themselves fighting a guerilla war against the South Vietnamese and their US allies. By 1969, over half a million US troops were stationed in the country, and the Vietnam War would claim the lives of almost 60,000 US servicemen and women.
Ho Chi Minh would die in September 1969, never living to see the united, communist Vietnam that he had dreamed of and fought so long for. In 1975, two years after the official end of US military involvement, South Vietnam’s capital, Saigon, fell to the Viet Cong and was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
Ben-Gurion’s death would follow that of his revolutionary friend a few years later, in December 1973. After his final years following his retirement from politics living in a modest home in Kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev Desert, he was buried there alongside his wife, Paula.
Israel-Vietnam relations
ISRAEL AND VIETNAM’S paths would cross relatively infrequently over the following decades, with one particular infamous encounter taking place.
On June 10, 1977, a remarkable rescue operation unfolded when the Israeli freighter ship, the Yuvali, bound for Taiwan, spotted a group of passengers in need. This group, consisting of approximately 66 Vietnamese refugees, marked the beginning of a series of arrivals in Israel between 1977 and 1979 of over 300 people fleeing communist Vietnam.
Israeli prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin, drew a poignant parallel, likening the plight of these refugees to that of Holocaust survivors.
Begin famously remarked, “We have never forgotten the boat with 900 Jews, St. Louis, having left Germany in the last weeks before the Second World War... traveling from harbor to harbor, from country to country, crying out for refuge. They were refused... Therefore, it was natural... to give those people a haven in the Land of Israel.”
Inspired by this ethos of compassion and solidarity, Begin directed Israeli diplomats to extend a lifeline to the Vietnamese refugees, offering them asylum in Israel. In a poignant moment captured by an Associated Press broadcast on October 26, 1979, a grateful refugee expressed profound appreciation to the government of Israel and to Begin, acknowledging their role in opening their homeland at a time when other nations hesitated to offer assistance in the face of communist oppression.
Vietnam and Israel would finally establish official diplomatic relations on July 12, 1993, followed by Israel opening its resident embassy in the capital Hanoi in December 1993
Ben-Gurion’s recollections of his Paris meetings with the tall, skinny Vietnamese man, spotlight the convergence of two revolutionary movements in one place and offer a unique perspective on one of the most important – and instrumental – periods in the 20th century.
In the post-WWII world, with national borders being redrawn, either along class lines or ethnicity lines, two dedicated men had found themselves in a Parisian hotel room, drawn together by history and the common bond of their enduring fight for their people’s independence.