Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this evening (Sunday, 16 August 2015), met with 15 Nobel sciences laureates, from various countries, who are in Israel for the WSCI conference,  and told them:
 
"I'm very glad to see you here and I think it's a unique privilege for me personally and I think also for the state, both the conference that you're coming in for – science – but also this time in history, in human history where knowledge and more importantly insight is developing at a rapid pace and we are at the point where we might partake of it. There is still a great battle between modernity and medievalism, early medievalism, which is being waged around us. We're in the vortex of that battle, but I have no doubt that ultimately modernity wins. It always does, but sometimes at great cost.
 
No one makes peace with the weak. No one. And so we have to be powerful for peace and for our future and for the prosperity of our people and for modernity to beat medievalism. I view the core of that power, the engine that is represented in this room right now, that's the core of our power: the power of the mind. That's what we need and that's what you represent and that's what we admire."