Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Meets with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the
Prime Minister’s Residence
24 February 2014
Prime
Minister Netanyahu: Chancellor
Merkel, Angela, welcome again to Israel, with your entire delegation. This is
an important meeting. Israel and Germany have a unique bond forged of tragedy
and hope, and a great friendship and cooperation.
I think that there are three main
subjects that I would like to raise in this visit, and they relate to our two
democracies’ quest for security, peace and prosperity.
On security, I would like to
discuss the ways to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons capability. I
believe that this is the greatest challenge to the security of the world.
On peace, I would like to discuss
with you how we can advance the efforts to achieve peace between Israel and the
Palestinians. And I can assure you Angela, that the people of Israel want
peace. They want a real peace; they want a peace that ends the conflict, that
finally gets the Palestinians to recognize the Jewish state and one in which we
have the necessary means of security to defend ourselves against any possible
contingency in this turbulent Middle East.
And finally, on prosperity, you
brought 16 members of your government here, which enables us to discuss the
various ways in which Israel and Germany can further strengthen our cooperation
in all the fields of economics, technology, and many, many other exchanges.
So we have a lot of work to do,
and we’re going to start this evening.
So, welcome to Jerusalem.
Chancellor
Merkel:
Dear Benjamin, Prime Minister, allow me to say that I’m delighted to be here
again for this, the fifth German-Israeli inter-governmental consultations.
We have come here, as you rightly
put it, with almost the whole of the new government, almost all of the
ministers are represented. And we wanted to show you in this way that this is
indeed a very strong friendship, which ties our two countries together, and a
friendship that we want to continue to develop further.
We are here in order to discuss a
very broad-based spectrum of different issues and we can discuss economic
issues, we will discuss research and development, we will discuss exchanges,
particularly, people-to-people exchanges, in particular, exchanges among the
members of our young generation, and we will also obviously address current
political issues.
We will also have an opportunity
to discuss the preparations leading up to next year, to the year in which we
celebrate the 50th anniversary of the German-Israeli diplomatic relations,
these five decades of which unite our two countries show how long Germany has
already tried to work shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel in order to secure the
future of Israel. |
