The lower house of the Swiss parliament voted on Tuesday against recognizing Palestinian statehood, following the example of the upper house last year.
In the vote at the National Council of Switzerland, 116 lawmakers out of 200 voted against recognition and 66 voted in favor, according to a bulletin by the Federal Assembly of Switzerland, the country’s bicameral parliament. Another 11 lawmakers abstained and the vote of the remaining seven lawmakers was not recorded.
The vote was on a text submitted by the Geneva Canton and, in addition to proposing Swiss recognition for Palestinian statehood, it would have affirmed that Switzerland make “every possible effort to establish a just and lasting peace between Israel and Palestine, drawing in particular on the Geneva Initiative.”
The Geneva Initiative was a plan promoted by left-wing and far-left Israelis and PLO officials in the 2000s that proposed that the Palestinian Authority take over the Old City of Jerusalem, except for the Jewish Quarter, among other concessions, en route to the establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.
Jonathan Kreutner, the General Secretary of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities, or SIG, told JNS: “We have always said that we support the two-state solution, but that it should be achieved through negotiations and a peaceful resolution, not through unilateral declarations.”
On Sep. 9, 2025, the Council of States, the Swiss senate, rejected an initiative for Switzerland to recognize the “State of Palestine,” with 27 voting against and 17 in favor.
