On 27 September 2026, 71 per cent of the Swiss electorate rejected the initiative that sought to fix by law a neutrality described as perpetual and armed. Not a single canton approved it. In Bern, the result was read as a plebiscite in favour of the way the Federal Council has been applying the principle for years, a neutrality that switches on when convenient and switches off when it is not. That same discretion allowed Switzerland to join European sanctions against Russia without delay in 2022 and to freeze, in 2026, arms export authorisations to the United States. The same discretion also explains why, while the country has banned the definitive export of war materiel to Israel for years, Swiss companies kept selling it parts, machines and components that ended up in the machinery of an army a UN commission has described as genocidal. Sunday did not settle a contradiction, it confirmed one at the ballot box.
A plebiscite without cracks
Seventy-one per cent nationwide, not a single canton in favour. In Geneva the no vote reached 66.6 per cent, in Vaud 73, in Neuchâtel 75.6, in Jura 71.8, in Fribourg 71.1, in Valais 67.1, in Bern 73.4. The scale of the rejection left no room for the usual reading of a Switzerland split between Latin and German-speaking cantons, between city and countryside. There was no fault line to exploit here.
The initiative carried the signature of Christoph Blocher, a former federal councillor, put forward by the Pro Suisse association with the backing of the SVP. It demanded that Switzerland join no military alliance such as NATO, take part in no foreign wars and adopt no economic or diplomatic sanctions against a state at war, except under an express UN obligation. Framed this way, the proposal did not widen Swiss neutrality, it froze it into a mould that would have barred the country from doing exactly what it does today with Russia.
That is where the result gets interesting. The Swiss people did not vote for a neutrality more generous to the victims of a war, nor for a greater commitment to international law. They voted to keep the Federal Council free to decide case by case, to sanction when it suits and to look away when that suits too. Blocher, so present throughout the campaign, did not show up at his supporters’ gathering that Sunday in Bern. It was the SVP’s third electoral defeat of the year, after the referendum on public broadcasting and the one on the demographic initiative “Switzerland to ten million”. None hurt as much as this one, because it struck at the heart of its political identity, neutrality, sovereignty, independence.
Ignazio Cassis, head of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, lived through his first popular vote as the minister in charge of the file that Sunday. He prevailed with ease, almost without resistance. The coincidence is not without irony. The same federal councillor who explained in 2024 that it was not the moment to recognise Palestine emerged strengthened by a result that, looked at closely, rewards none of his positions on Gaza, it rewards only the status quo he has administered himself for years.
The neutrality that switches on
In February 2022, Switzerland broke with a tradition of caution and adopted without delay the economic sanctions the European Union imposed on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. The Federal Council argued at the time that taking up those sanctions compromised the country’s neutrality in no way whatsoever. Its speed contrasts with everything that would follow over Gaza.
In March 2026, Bern activated the same reflex again, this time towards Washington. According to the government’s own confirmation, since 28 February of that year, amid a full-blown escalation of the Middle East conflict between Israel, the United States and Iran, not a single application to export war materiel to the United States has been approved or rejected. They were simply frozen, in the name of neutrality, in a visible gesture that made headlines across half the world.
The map of authorised exports says more than any official speech. Eighty-six per cent of the arms Switzerland sold in 2025 went to Europe, ten per cent to the Americas, barely three per cent to Asia. Germany topped the list of buyers with 386.4 million francs, followed by the United States with 94.2 million and Hungary with 63.4 million. None of those countries, not Germany, not the United States, not Hungary, ever features in the Swiss debate on neutrality, because none poses Bern the moral dilemma that the word Gaza has posed for two years now.
Switzerland thus knows how to halt a flow of weapons overnight, when a visible political decision by the Federal Council demands it. Facing Gaza, that same neutrality is exercised differently, not as a political veto but as the administrative silence of whoever classifies a good as dual-use rather than as war materiel. The difference lies not in the legal vocabulary but in who decides and who pays the political cost.
According to official figures from the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, Switzerland exported 948.2 million francs of arms in 2025, 43 per cent more than the previous year, while the government itself confirms that definitive exports of war materiel to Israel have not been authorised for several years.
The neutrality that stays silent
The ban exists on paper. In practice, what Swiss law does not authorise as war materiel keeps reaching Israel under another name, that of dual-use goods. Since 7 October 2023, Swiss companies have exported more than 24 million francs of goods in this category to Israel, with a sudden jump from a mere 238,000 francs in the last quarter of 2023 to close to six million in the first quarter of 2024 alone.
An RTS investigation revealed the names and the sums. Trumpf Schweiz, in Graubünden, sold Israel’s defence ministry three laser cutting machines for 1.315 million francs. StarragTornos, in Fribourg, had two precision machining centres bought from it, for 1.43 million, by Israeli defence firms including Ricor. Metallux, in Ticino, supplied five hundred hybrid circuits to Ricor and further circuits to Semiconductor Devices Ltd, controlled by Rafael and Elbit. From Thurgau came the military-grade paints that Mipa Coatings Schweiz sold to Israeli defence contractors. And in Schaffhausen, Georg Fischer supplied flow control valves to the Ashdod refinery and to Israel Chemicals, the latter a producer of white phosphorus. Much of what these components end up in are drones, thermal sensors and parts for Merkava, Namer and Eitan armoured vehicles.
Geneva hosts the European seat of the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the institutional memory of the conventions bearing its name. Switzerland pictures itself as the waiting room of world peace, the place where the most irreconcilable adversaries end up, sooner or later, sitting at the same table. That image coexists, with nothing in official discourse registering the friction, alongside laser cutting machines built in Graubünden and industrial valves built in Schaffhausen that end up in Israeli facilities tied to white phosphorus production.
In 2024, a record year according to figures published by the newspaper Blick, these dual-use goods totalled 16.7 million francs, of which 500,000 had a destination recognised as exclusively military. Article 6 of the Arms Trade Treaty bars authorising a transfer when the state knows the materiel could be used to commit genocide, crimes against humanity or grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Jean-Daniel Ruch, a former Swiss ambassador, went further in remarks to the same paper, Swiss neutrality law itself forbids procuring a comparative advantage for one country over another in an armed conflict, which would make sustained inaction not a mere ethical lapse but a possible breach of the very norm Switzerland claims to defend so zealously.
The Swiss National Bank held a 29 million dollar stake in Elbit Systems in 2024, Israel’s leading arms manufacturer, according to figures cited by the newspaper Blick.
On 9 September 2025, the Council of States rejected a motion to recognise the State of Palestine, born in Geneva’s Grand Council, despite strong support from French-speaking Switzerland, as reported by Le Courrier and Le Temps. The same day saw the defeat, according to the first of those two outlets, of a second proposal from the socialist Carlo Sommaruga carrying concrete economic measures, among them ending military trade and suspending the free trade agreement between Switzerland and Israel, opposed chiefly by the SVP’s Mauro Chiesa and the socialist Daniel Jositsch, the latter already known for consistently clashing with Sommaruga’s initiatives on Israel. Both texts followed the line set months earlier by federal councillor Ignazio Cassis, who had described recognition of Palestine, in remarks to RTS, as “an instrument better kept for later”. The Council of States did not know it yet. A week later, on 16 September 2025, a UN commission of inquiry formally concluded that Israel had committed and continued to commit genocide against the Palestinian population of Gaza.
That timeline sums up better than any analysis what separates politics from evidence. Politics decides first, according to internal balances. Evidence, once it arrives, no longer has anyone left to present itself to.
Nor does Switzerland recognise Palestine as a state. In September 2025, France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Portugal and other countries formally recognised the Palestinian state, taking to around one hundred and fifty-eight the number of UN members that do. Switzerland was not among them. The Federal Department of Foreign Affairs keeps conditioning that recognition on a lasting peace built on the two-state solution and on concrete implementation measures still to be defined, according to ambassador Monika Schmutz Kirgöz, quoted by swissinfo. Cassis had summed it up earlier in a phrase that stuck, it was not the moment. Switzerland explicitly refuses to use recognition as leverage on Israel and prefers to claim its role as mediator from Geneva, even as 57 per cent of Swiss public opinion backs the very recognition the government keeps postponing.
The trade neutrality does not want to lose
On 29 November 2026, barely two months after the neutrality plebiscite, the Swiss will return to the polls to vote on the law the Council of States passed on 11 June 2025, by 31 votes to 11, to ease exports of war materiel. The text authorises in advance sales to twenty-five countries, seventeen from the European Union plus the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Argentina, and only allows an export to that bloc to be refused in exceptional circumstances. Those same countries will also be able to re-export Swiss materiel to third parties without seeking further authorisation. Parliament defended the reform by arguing that, without it, Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark would stop buying from Swiss industry. The Group for a Switzerland without an Army, which had already announced in June 2025 that it would challenge the law by referendum, argues that easing these exports amounts to laundering, under the flag of neutrality, a trade that has nothing neutral left about it.
That same government which invokes international law to justify why it cannot sell arms to Israel is preparing to ask its own people for permission to sell more weapons, faster, to almost everyone else. Swiss neutrality is not a principle to be applied or betrayed, it is an instrument that switches on according to who benefits from silence and who benefits from noise. On 29 November, when the country votes again on its own arms trade, it will find out whether it prefers to keep calling a principle what, looked at closely, was always calculation…
G.S.
Sources
- Exportation de matériel de guerre en 2025
- Les Suisses rejettent l’initiative sur la neutralité à 71%
- Neutralité suisse, une claque, un plébiscite et une clarification qui tombe à point
- La Suisse prend les mêmes sanctions que l’UE contre la Russie
- Switzerland halts new arms exports to America
- Des entreprises suisses ont maintenu le soutien à l’effort de guerre israélien à Gaza malgré les critiques
- La Suisse dans l’illégalité, ces 10 pays livrent des armes à Israël
- Berne enterre Gaza
- Le Conseil des Etats refuse de reconnaître la Palestine « en l’état actuel », malgré un fort soutien romand
- Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission finds
- Pourquoi la Suisse ne reconnaît pas la Palestine en tant qu’État
- La France et plusieurs autres pays occidentaux reconnaissent l’État de Palestine à l’ONU
- Principaux points du Traité sur le commerce des armes
- Le Conseil des Etats veut faciliter l’exportation d’armes
- Le peuple suisse votera sur la loi assouplie en matière d’exportation de matériel de guerre
