• Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of United States foreign assistance since the Second World War.
• United States law already contains the instruments that would restrict this. Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act bars security assistance to any government engaged in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognised human rights; the Leahy Laws bar assistance to units credibly implicated in such violations; and Section 620I bars assistance to any country that restricts the delivery of United States humanitarian aid. None has been applied.
• The aid figures are the published cumulative totals at three dates, not an annual series. The Congressional Research Service does not publish a continuous machine-readable annual table.

• The fourfold surge in the six months after the embargo was lifted shows the embargo functioned as a pause, not a reversal: German supply resumed at a higher rate than at any point before it was imposed.
• The Left Party, whose parliamentary question produced the figures, accused Berlin of "unlimited double standards".
• Nicaragua's case against Germany for complicity in genocide, filed at the ICJ in April 2024, was still pending when the 2026 approvals were disclosed.

• Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband added a "double lock" on 8 September 2026 — a commitment to refuse future licence applications that materially contribute to the occupation — without extending the suspension to the F-35 exemption.
• Nearly three years into the war, the UK had still not moved to a full two-way arms embargo, the demand made since 2024 by the TUC, the Green Party, Humza Yousaf and the Palestinian Youth Movement Britain.
• In July 2025, while sitting in the cabinet licensing these exports, then-Health Secretary Wes Streeting wrote privately to Peter Mandelson that Israel was "committing war crimes before our eyes". He was appointed Defence Secretary on 20 July 2026.

• The legal position is not in doubt. Common Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions obliges every High Contracting Party to ensure respect for the Conventions; the Arms Trade Treaty, Article 6(3), prohibits any transfer where the state knows the arms would be used in war crimes; and the International Court of Justice's advisory opinion of 19 July 2024 held that all states are under an obligation not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the unlawful occupation.
• On 20 June 2025 the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory published a report naming the corporate entities she found to be sustaining it, and recommending that states and companies sever those ties.

• Divestment is not a boycott of a people. It is the withdrawal of investment from named commercial activity in territory an international court has held to be unlawfully occupied.
• The precedent is exact and recent: the same instruments — disclosure, listing, divestment, procurement bans — were used against apartheid South Africa, and the states that used them are in many cases the same states that now decline to.

• The pattern is the point. In every vote since November 2024 the tally has been fourteen to one: every other member of the Security Council, including every other permanent member and every American ally on the Council, voted for a ceasefire.
• General Assembly resolutions on the same question have passed repeatedly by margins above 120 votes. They are not binding. That is the design the veto protects.

Among the thirty-six: the United States, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Austria, Greece, Switzerland, Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, North Macedonia, Panama, Cameroon, Eritrea, and a group of Pacific microstates — Fiji, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Samoa, Tonga and Tuvalu — whose votes at the General Assembly are reliably aligned with Washington.

• Recognition is a legal act with consequences: it establishes the recognising state's position that Palestine satisfies the criteria of statehood, and it opens treaty relations, diplomatic representation and standing before international bodies.
• It is also the measure on which the gap between governments and their populations is widest. The states that continue to withhold recognition are, with few exceptions, the states that continue to supply the weapons.