From Little Rock to Tel Aviv: Ambassador Simon Geissbühler on Diplomacy, Democracy, and Swiss Neutrality

Tel Aviv Diary Podcast · Feb 3, 2026 · 52m

In this episode of Tel Aviv Diary, Marc Schulman welcomes Swiss Ambassador Simon Geissbühler for a conversation that moves from personal history to the mechanics of diplomacy in a region at war. Geisbühler begins with his own unlikely route into foreign service: raised outside Bern, trained in history and political science at the University of Bern, and drawn to the United States in 1994 for a year at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock as a competitive diver—a “Deep South” education, he argues, that later helped him better understand America beyond Washington and the coasts. From there…