Economy Minister Nir Barkat spoke to i24NEWS in an exclusive interview on Thursday about the opportunity for cooperation between the Israeli-Moroccan governments and their respective businesspeople.

Barkat, who is visiting Morocco, started with the example of India being a gateway to Asia, saying, “There’s an opportunity for Morocco to be a gateway to Africa and a gateway for some fields even to Europe.”

Through “the people-to-people and government-to-government relationship,” Barkat gave his recommendation to entrepreneurs in Israel, to “take a serious look at joint ventures in Morocco."

“If you could find your complementary Moroccan people,” he said that the right person can help a business scale, “to the rest of Africa and even some parts of Europe.

Barkat gave examples of the technologies that were mutually beneficial to both people, such as agriculture, seafood, energy and water. He told i24NEWS that these are “lots of critical paths for the human race” and that the two countries have a lot of technologies that complement each other.

He even looked at the long history that the two people share, noting that “there’s a lot of love, and people want to return and see the relationships return to what there was in the past,” and use it to build a future together.

“Look at the trend, the growth of the trade between the two countries is really positive and steep,” Barkat told i24NEWS. “If you look backwards and you understand the relationships, and understand the challenges the world faces, if you take scalability and entrepreneurship and you marry them together, you have a successful model for doing business.”

Morocco renewed its official relations with Israel amid a string of normalization deals between Israel and Arab countries, brokered by the Trump administration in late 2020.

Since that time, several top Israeli officials have visited Morocco, including former Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and former Defense Minister Benny Gantz.

Barkat’s predecessor in the Economy Ministry, Orna Barbivai, visited Morocco in February of last year, where she signed a new economic cooperation and trade agreement with her Moroccan counterpart.

Since the resumption of ties, Morocco and Israel have sealed a number of cooperation agreements, including defense, AI, water desalination, desert technologies, food processing technologies, and renewable energy, to name a few.