The PM and his wife concluded their five-day visit to Sydney on Sunday morning, meeting with Foreign Minister Julie Bishop a few hours before their departure.
According to his press release, Netanyahu and Bishop discussed, among other things, the “substantial dangers of the nuclear agreement and in Iran’s aggressive conduct in the region as well as in its support for terrorism and the continued development of its ballistic missile program.”
The Prime Minister also “explained the difference between the concept of two states and the content and substance of two states.”
“This has been a wonderful visit here. You people are amazing,” Netanyahu told the foreign minister before holding bilateral talks behind closed doors. He joked with Bishop, who had just returned from a trip to the US and UK, that the two of them had “shared more or less the same route.”
On Saturday, about 1000 anti-Israel protesters assembled at Sydney’s Town Hall to demand that Netanyahu should not be treated like a celebrity but should be on trial for war crimes instead. Hilal Asmar, a Palestinian activist living in Sydney, told AAP, “This guy is a wanted criminal, and our prime minister is very happy to hug him and kiss him and be with him – that’s unfair. Shame on him.”
Netanyahu and Bishop agreed to upgrade security, intelligence, economic, cyber and technology relations between their two countries. The two-way trade between Israel and Australia is worth about $1.2 billion annually, and Netanyahu declared he’d like to see this amount doubled and tripled.