Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu met Tuesday with Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Global Google, and drew a Google doodle for him.
"At our meeting I bestowed upon Schmidt a 'doodle' (a tailor designed Google logo ) that I drew on the basis of suggestions that I received from [web] surfers in Israel," Netanyahu told visitors on his Facebook page.
"The drawing is comprised of the Israeli flag, a person sitting under a beach umbrella, and the crystals discovered by Professor Dan Shechtman, who won the Nobel Prize this year, as a token of the fact that Israel stands in the forefront of science and technology," he wrote.
Schmidt, for his part, gave Netanyahu a framed reproduction of a fragment of the Scroll of Isaiah, as a reminder of the Dead Sea Scrolls project that Google has undertaken together with the Israel Museum. The project involves uploading high resolution images of the scrolls to the internet, for the world to peruse. Schmidt spoke about Google's commitment to the preservation of cultural heritage.
The Prime Minister called on citizens of Israel to upload old films to the State Archive, in order to preserve national memory.
Schmidt said that while this is his first visit to Israel, he sees it as the "start-up nation" and says that the fact that Israelis are conscripted into the military gives them a great advantage as hi-tech employees.
Israeli workers are more mature, independent and organized and better able to cope with a competitive environment, he explained – and this leads them to many accomplishments.
"We appreciate Israeli engineers, whose quality is great," he said. "They develop things here that are used all over the world." The decision to invest in Israel "is one of the best decisions Google ever made," he added.
Netanyahu said that "the more places science seeps into, the better the world will be. We want the internet to reach countries that block access and your contribution in this field is phenomenal."
Netanyahu and Schmidt discussed cooperation between Israel and Google in the fields of medicine, science and cyber security. They also spoke about alternative energy sources that could make certain regimes less important than they currently are.
