There are moments in a new role when you understand, very quickly, why the work matters.
My first week as director of Innovation Diplomacy at Hamitbah (the Western Negev Innovation Authority) began in the field. I organized a diplomatic mission that brought 40 ambassadors and diplomats to the Gaza border communities, part of a global outreach effort, marking the lead-up to the third commemoration of October 7.
What these diplomats encountered was striking: communities alive with agricultural innovation and technological ingenuity, a region that has transformed lived experience into a global model of human resilience. Among them was His Excellency Ambassador Nguyen Ky Son of Vietnam.
Within weeks, I received an invitation to represent Hamitbah at a seminar at the Embassy of Vietnam in Tel Aviv dedicated to high-tech agricultural cooperation between our two countries.
It was, in the truest sense, a beginning. A first conversation about what might be possible between two nations that have more in common than geography would suggest.
This July marks 33 years of official diplomatic relations between Israel and Vietnam.
The atmosphere in the seminar room was entirely forward-looking. The recent implementation of the Vietnam-Israel Free Trade Agreement (VIFTA) has streamlined customs and removed tariffs, with bilateral trade on track to reach nearly $4 billion this year. The question animating the room was where it could go next.
Ambassador Son set the tone with characteristic directness: “My mission is to turn our potential into opportunities, and turn opportunities into actual cooperation and fruitful outcomes.”
He spoke of Vietnam’s ambition to achieve full developed-nation status by 2045, and of the acute environmental pressures that make that goal both urgent and complex: typhoons, rising sea levels, prolonged droughts, and the slow encroachment of saline water into agricultural zones that feed millions are present realities for Vietnam.
Israeli innovation, the ambassador conveyed, is part of a strategic national response.
“When we talk about Israel and Vietnam, we talk about opportunities,” noted Ofer Fohrer, senior director at the Economy and Industry Ministry, perfectly capturing the spirit of the event. With the VIFTA now in force, the pathway for realizing those opportunities has never been clearer.
Fohrer closed with a resounding call to action, affirming Israel’s commitment to “build the bridge between Israel and Vietnam so we can grow together and succeed together.”
The seminar brought together around 20 Israeli delegates from municipal authorities, kibbutzim, and technology companies alongside more than 80 Vietnamese participants joining online, from local government officials to university researchers.
During the Q&A, the Vietnamese participants asked questions that went well beyond diplomatic courtesy: technical specifications, processing and packaging standards, mechanisms for hands-on training exchanges. It was the focused inquiry of people facing real challenges and genuinely searching for real answers.
The seminar’s most quietly powerful moment came from Miss Hong Shurany, chairwoman of the Vietnamese Community in Israel, who shared her personal experience cultivating Israeli crop varieties on Vietnamese soil.
Her words stayed with me: “A nation’s advantage lies not in what nature bestows, but in how its people create value from what they have.”
When Israeli agricultural technology meets Vietnam’s natural potential, she observed, the result is a model of mutual development that neither country could build alone.
Developing together
When I presented Hamitbah’s vision, I began with what seemed like an unlikely comparison. On the surface, the Western Negev and Vietnam could not be more different: an arid landscape shaped by conflict and scarcity against a lush, coastal, ecologically rich nation.
And yet both regions operate under extreme, recurring, systemic shocks. In the Western Negev, that shock is geopolitical, sudden, severe, and unpredictable. In Vietnam, it arrives as Category-5 typhoons, flash flooding, extended droughts, and advancing saline water.
In both cases, the central challenge is identical: How do you build a food system that continues to function when everything around it is failing?
Standard agricultural technology runs out of answers here. When a typhoon brings down the civilian power grid, standalone sensors and smart irrigation systems become dead weight. They are built for stability. We do not live in a stable world.
At Hamitbah, we build what we call Resilience Tech: an interlocking survival ecosystem of autonomous drones, smart water management systems, and military-grade anti-jamming communications, integrated into a single operational stack.
The result is a farm and a community that remains functional even during total power or GPS blackouts. True food security is the ability of a family, a village, a nation to keep producing food when the worst happens. That demands functional continuity under pressure.
Nothing at Hamitbah was developed in a comfortable laboratory. It was built in the field, stress-tested under real conditions, and refined through years of operating at the edge of what agricultural systems can bear.
That history is what makes the Western Negev a meaningful resource for a country like Vietnam: a live sandbox where the pressures are genuine and the results have already been proven.
We are proposing a relationship built on that foundation, one in which Vietnamese agricultural needs and realities shape the design of solutions from the beginning, and where they are developed and validated together before being scaled. We are at the very start of that conversation, and we intend to pursue it with full seriousness.
We are deeply grateful to the Vietnamese Embassy for the warmth and vision with which they organized this seminar. It was exactly the kind of first step that points somewhere worth going.
Thirty-three years of diplomatic friendship between Israel and Vietnam is a proud foundation. What could be built on top of it – in agriculture, in resilience, in shared problem-solving – is a story still waiting to be written. And I, for one, am glad to be in the room where it begins.
The writer is the director of innovation diplomacy and strategic partnerships at Hamitbah, the Western Negev Innovation Authority.