​(Communicated by the Prime Minister's Media Adviser)
 
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, today (Wednesday, 13 June 2018), at the Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem, met with Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov. Prime Minister Netanyahu made the following remarks at the joint statements:
 
"Welcome to Israel again. I want to congratulate you first on your birthday, and also to welcome you and your delegation to Jerusalem.
 
We have a wonderful friendship between Bulgaria and Israel. There is a human bridge of Bulgarian Jews who immigrated to Israel who have the warmest feelings towards Bulgaria, and they’ve contributed much to Israel.
 
Our friendship goes back many, many years. We will never forget how the people of Bulgaria laid on the train tracks and prevented the deportation of Jews in Sofia.
 
We appreciate your efforts against antisemitism, and our common battle against radical Islam and the terrorism it espouses that claimed a tragic cost of lives, Israelis and Bulgarians, on the soil of Bulgaria.
 
We’re not only fighting the bad, we’re working for the good. And we have great cooperation in so many fields, among them health and technology, and many more that we’ll discuss today and advance today.
 
I want to thank you for your consistent defense of Israel in international forums, including in the EU. It’s time that all of Europe’s leaders understood that Israel is the one that defends the interests, our common interests in the Middle East, both in terms of security and in many, many other ways.
 
In that spirit of friendship, I welcome you, friend, to Jerusalem again.
 
We’ve accomplished so much since we first met many years ago in Tel Aviv, and our personal friendship reflects the friendship between our peoples and our countries. So I want to thank you for that ongoing cooperation, including in the matters of security."