Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this afternoon (Tuesday, 20 May 2014), in his Jerusalem office, met with Bulgarian Prime Minister Plamen Oresharski and made the following remarks at the start of their meeting:

"Prime Minister Oresharski, welcome to Jerusalem. It's my pleasure to welcome you here. We have a great friendship between the people of Bulgaria and the Jewish people. First of all, we have many Israelis who came from Bulgaria, and they’re a very warm community and very robust citizens of Israel, but also champions of the friendship between our two peoples, so it's a human bridge.

Secondly, we will never forget the courageous role played by so many in Bulgaria during the Holocaust at the height of our tragedy, when teachers, priests, intellectuals and others stood in the middle of Sofia and said: we refuse to cooperate in the mass murder of Jews, and I will always remember this telegram sent by the Nazi representative in Sofia, and he said: Well, the Bulgarian people have not yet advanced to the necessary level to be able to cooperate with Nazism. Precisely. They retained their humanity and showed extraordinary heroism at the most dire times for the Jewish people, so we will always remember that, and every time that I have the opportunity to do so, I mention this, especially in the way that it stood out in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Third, we have a growing partnership between our two peoples. I was involved as a young diplomat in establishing this relationship, I view it as a very important one, and we cooperate in every field and I look forward to doing more. We have had our share of tragedy – the terrorist attack in Burgas in which Israeli citizens and Bulgarian citizens were killed, they were killed by Hezbollah, which is a sub-contractor of Iran, and Iran is the world's foremost terrorist state. We cannot allow the world's foremost terrorist state to get nuclear weapons capability, and if the Ayatollahs have their fingers on the nuclear trigger, this will endanger the entire world, and that must be avoided.

I look forward to talking to you about our challenges and our opportunities to cement our friendship in so many fields, and I welcome you once again to Jerusalem as a friend and as a great supporter of the Bulgarian-Israeli relations.  I look forward to having your entire government. I know you have several ministers here, but perhaps we can make this into a big habit.

Welcome to Jerusalem."