Statement by PM Netanyahu at EXPO Milan
(Communicated by the Prime Minister's Media Adviser)

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, today (Thursday, 27 August 2015), made
the following statement at EXPO Milan:

"Thank you, Minister Martina, and thank you, Mr. Sala, thank you all. I'm
deeply excited to be here with my wife and our delegation, and we want to
congratulate you for this outstanding exhibit and exhibition here in Milan.
It speaks volumes about your vision and about the success of Italy and the
dynamism that now directs it. And we're very happy to have been one of the
first countries to have committed to come here. We committed, we came and
now we have a wall.

And I'm so excited to be here. I'm going to say a few words in Hebrew and
then I'll say a few words in English.

I said, Mr. Minister, that I'm very proud as an Israeli to be here because
we are contributing to the defeat of Malthusian projections. Malthus said a
few hundred years ago that the world's population will die out because of
irreversible disparity between the numbers of people and the food available,
and obviously science has defeated that. But Israel in this field has been a
pioneer of the world for the last 70 and more years, even before the
founding of our state. We've developed tremendous strides in drip
irrigation, in desalinization. We're the world's leader in wastewater
recycling. We recycle about 80 percent of our wastewater. I think number two
is about 25 percent. So we have not only changed our situation.

We have ten times more population than we had when the state was founded 67
years ago and we have half the rainfall. Yet Israel has no water problems
because we were able to solve this with all these techniques and we are
prepared and are doing our share to partake this information with people
everywhere around the world, so they can have water, they can have crops,
they can have cows that give a lot more milk and many, many other things
that offer the betterment for mankind. We're very happy that we can do this
here in Italy, in Milan. We have very strong bonds of friendship with Italy.
We are doing everything together in commerce and trade, in technology, in
tourism, in science, in culture, and we want to do even more.

I look forward to discussing all of these areas with Prime Minister Renzi
who visited Israel, gave a remarkable speech in our parliament, the Knesset.
There's a very strong feeling of friendship and a desire to further
cooperate in all these areas and I'm going to discuss some of these ideas
with Prime Minister Renzi when we meet two days from now in Florence.

I have to say that one of the things that I saw in the pavilion is going to
take up our time. Israel and Italy are cooperating in one African country
today to better their agriculture. Why one? Why not twenty? Why not thirty?
If we pull our resources, our knowledge, our technology together, we can
help many, many countries in Africa have not only better agriculture but a
better life, and this is one of the key areas that I'm going to discuss with
Prime Minister Renzi on this visit.

I'm proud of everything that we're doing. I think it has to do a lot with
our culture. Our scholars for centuries studied the Talmud. They always
believed that there wasn’t one answer. They always questioned. They always
argued. There wasn’t a single set truth, and truth wasn’t achieved by
repetition and memory. It was achieved by constant inquiry. And this
tradition was translated in modern times by Jewish scientists and Israeli
scientists into the fields of mathematics and physics and chemistry and in
every field of life, medicine. And it is now being translated by Israeli
entrepreneurs and technologists for all the things that can make a better
life for all the people of the planet.

So it's in this spirit of cooperation with Italy and our own spirit of
inquiry and advancement and innovation that I'm delighted to be here with my
wife and all our delegation in Milan. We wish you great success. Thank you
very much. Thank you."