Steps Against Israel’s Pharma and Continuing Horrors in the West Bank

Photograph Source: Raysonho @ Open Grid Scheduler / Scalable Grid Engine -CC0

Going to the pharmacy is always full of anxiety. It is not a pleasure to pick up medicines to cure some health problems. It has now become easier for me to go to my local pharmacy since my wife and I convinced the pharmacist to offer clients generic drugs instead of Mepha products from Teva. And it appears that more and more clients in Geneva and Switzerland are boycotting Mepha/Teva drugs, if possible. It is our small effort, but it is far from stopping the horrors in the West Bank, as reported by former Israeli military and government officials as well as the U.S. ambassador to Israel.

The pharmaceutical industry is an important part of Israel’s economy. And trying to get pharmacy customers to boycott its products is a small step against Israel’s genocidal policies. Israel’s GDP was $540 billion in 2024. Pharmaceutical exports were about $1.8 billion that year; they are not a huge share of GDP, but they are an important export business for a country the size of Israel.

Mepha and Teva have more than 330 products in Switzerland and sold about 25 million medicine packages in 2025, making their combined operation the leading medicine supplier in Switzerland. Their presence in the Swiss market is hard to ignore.

And it is what makes the pharmacy boycott possible. You don’t have to boycott some obscure Israeli product that nobody has heard of. Mepha is sitting on the shelves of many ordinary Swiss pharmacies.

There has been a small Swiss campaign against Mepha/Teva, intensifying in 2026. It includes an appeal to Geneva pharmacists to stop advertising and selling Mepha products where possible as well as an open letter directed to Geneva and Swiss health authorities calling for reduced dependence on Teva. In May and June, the Geneva boycott campaign reported pickets outside pharmacies, the distribution of around 500 flyers and more than 1,000 boycott stickers. The boycott campaign admitted that it had not established a method of measuring the campaign’s impact before launching it.

Fighting companies like Mepha/Teva in Switzerland and the pharma lobby — like fighting Swiss banks — is not simple. The pharmaceutical lobby is very well represented in Swiss political and regulatory circles.

In 2022, the magazine Public Eye identified 40 members of the Swiss National Council (House of Representatives) and Council of States (Senate) who had a direct connection to the pharmaceutical industry and/or health insurers. In 2025, Public Eye identified 239 people who had moved between the pharmaceutical industry and Swissmedic or the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH), including 173 connected to Swissmedic and 66 to the FOPH. Of the 741 people Public Eye identified as having worked at Swissmedic, 294 — almost 40% — had previously worked for at least one pharmaceutical company.

Switzerland is not simply a country selling Israeli drugs. It has its own powerful pharmaceutical industry, its own pharmaceutical lobby and a regulatory system in which people move between the companies and the institutions responsible for regulating them. When I asked my local pharmacist why an association of pharmacies didn’t jointly stop supplying Mepha, he just shrugged, recognizing the limits of what can be done.

But there has been progress. After speaking to the pharmacist several times about selling Mepha/Teva products and encouraging the pharmacy to indicate generic substitutes instead, my wife brought up the fact that the official pharmacy car had Mepha printed on its side. Just last week, after I asked, the pharmacist proudly said, “The Mepha sign is no longer on the pharmacy’s car.”

Removing the Mepha sign from the pharmacy car is a very small step. What the former Israeli generals and officials saw in the West Bank shows how much more needs to be done.

A recent New York Times article reported their reactions. “This, what the settlers are doing here, is the real threat to Israel,” Maj. Gen. Eyal Ben Reuven said. “This is more concerning to me than Iran, Gaza or Lebanon.”

“This is ethnic cleansing, to put it simply,” a retired brigadier general and former minister of health declared.

“Once a society behaves this way it is doomed,” a retired Air Force general observed.

“I’m ashamed of what our people are doing here,” a retired Air Force general confessed.

As for civil society protests, follow the courageous Israeli and Palestinian “Combattants for Peace” in Stephen Apkon’s dramatic film “There is Another Way.”

Even the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has publicly condemned Israeli settler violence in the West Bank. In August 2026, during the siege of Palestinian homes in Qusra, he called the settlers involved “terrorists” and said their actions went beyond ordinary criminal behavior.

On September 5, 2026, Huckabee visited Turmus Ayya in the West Bank, met Palestinian Americans affected by settler attacks, and again described violent settler actions as “an act of terror.” He said crimes and acts of terror “cannot continue” without Israeli authorities investigating and prosecuting them. Huckabee said he would exert “pressure in order to get some resolution to things you’ve [mostly Palestinian American residents of Turmus] brought up today.”

The September 5-6 Times article reported that in June, “More than 200 prominent Israelis signed a letter…demanding that the government stop the attacks against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank. The signatories included two former prime ministers, more than three dozen retired Army and Air Force generals, the former heads of the nation’s foreign and domestic intelligence services, as well as rabbis, a Nobel laureate and one of Israel’s most revered novelists.”

The Mepha sign has disappeared from one pharmacy car in Geneva. And the pharmacy no longer pushes Mepha/Teva products unless there are no alternatives. Those are small things and minuscule protests.

Referring to the UK’s planned ban on trade with unlawful Israeli settlements, Francesca Albanese, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the occupied territories, said in an interview with the Guardian: “because the 2024 ICJ advisory opinion declares the entire Israeli presence in the occupied territories as unlawful, third states’ obligations not to ‘render aid or assistance’ extends to everything that sustains that unlawful presence as a whole.”

The words of the Israeli generals who went to the West Bank are hard to ignore. They came back talking about ethnic cleansing, the threat to Israel and their shame at what their country was doing. And the American ambassador, a strong supporter of Israel, calling the settlers “terrorists” and promising to exert pressure for change is also hard to ignore.

For the moment, boycotting at the pharmacy, former military and government officials signing a protest letter, the brave resistance by Combattants for Peace, and even the American ambassador’s promised pressure have had no effect. Netanyahu and his government have not budged.

Daniel Warner is the author of An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations. (Lynne Rienner). He lives in Geneva.