Netanyahu meets Bulgarian PM, praises ties between the countries

Bulgaria is an important partner for Israel inside the European Union, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu highlighted on Wednesday shortly before a meeting with Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov.

“I want to thank you for your consistent defense of Israel in international forums, including in the EU,” Netanyahu said at a photo opportunity with Borissov. “It’s time that all of Europe’s leaders understand 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.”

Bulgaria has also softened statements and resolutions coming out of Brussels regarding Israel and the Palestinians and is one of the few countries that break with other EU members voting in international bodies on a regular basis, abstaining rather than voting against Israel.

One glaring exception, however – and one that Netanyahu did not mention in his statement – was Bulgaria’s vote in the UN General Assembly in December, condemning the US decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem. Bulgaria was one of 22 EU countries that voted for that resolution, as opposed to only six who abstained.

Borissov arrived on Tuesday for a two day visit that will also take him to the Palestinian Authority. Unlike Austrian President Sebastian Kurz, Borissov’s scheduled visit to the Old City does not include a stop at the Western Wall.

Borissov’s visit comes just three months after Bulgarian President Rumen Radev, a sign of the importance Sofia attributes to ties with Israel.

Netanyahu praised the “wonderful” friendship between the two countries, and said that Israel will never forget the Bulgarian citizens who laid themselves down on the train tracks during World War II to prevent the deportation of Bulgaria’s Jews from Sofia.

Israel and Bulgaria share a joint struggle against radical Islam and the terror that it espouses, which claimed lives from both countries, Netanyahu added as a reference to the 2012 attack at Burgas where five Israelis and a Bulgarian driver were killed in a bus attack.

Borissov, in an address Tuesday evening to the American Jewish Committee Global Forum, referenced the Jerusalem issue, saying that Bulgaria is “convinced that the Jewish people’s relation to Jerusalem is indisputable,” and that his country is “not indifferent to the wish of the Jewish population of Israel and world Jewry, and to the right of Israel, being a sovereign state, to decide which city will be its capital and to insist that it be internationally recognized.”

At the same time, however, he made clear Bulgaria would not follow the US, Guatemala and Honduras’s leads and move its embassy to Jerusalem.

“The status of Jerusalem as the sacred site of the three monotheistic religions should be agreed in the course of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations that will lead to an accord on the final status of the Palestinian territories,” he said.