Foreign Minister Kotzias’ statements before his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Jerusalem, 6 July 2015)

N. KOTZIAS: Thank you for the welcome, Mr. Prime Minister. I am very happy to be here in Israel, a country with which we have thousands of years of connections, through many common values and visions, these thousands of years, being together in history and, I hope, being even closer in the future.

I am here for constructive talks with you, Prime Minister, as a good friend of Israel. And you know that Israel is a good and important friend for Greece.

In recent years, we have developed bilateral relations, lately in all sectors: security, energy, tourism, economy. I was just discussing, yesterday, with your close adviser about economy. We talked today with your Minister for Energy. And I think that we have very good projects to do together, not only for our generation, but for the next generations, too.

There is an ongoing and in-depth bilateral political dialogue on all the bilateral region security issues. And I always say that we are living inside a triangle of destabilization. It is a triangle with Ukraine at the top, on the left is Libya, on the right side we have the Middle East: Iraq and Syria. And we have to create, inside this triangle a stability and security framework. The relations between Israel, Cyprus and Greece are very important. It is a line of stability in this area. We have a common interest in stability and security, we have some other kinds of thinking about many other problems, but at the core of our beliefs, I think we have the same interests: security and stability in the area inside this triangle.

And we think there is a mutual decision for dynamic development of the strategic cooperation between our two friendly peoples. And always when I see people coming from Israel, I always think, these people, this population, loves Greece so much that we have to learn to love Israel the same way.

Thank you very much. And we are here and I think our discussion will be very productive for the interests of both countries. Thank you.