Link to article: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/24/reckless-rights-group-decries-germany-lifting-arms-embargo-on-israel
Amnesty Internation has strongly condemned Germany’s decision to lift a partial arms embargo on Israel, calling the move “reckless” and “unlawful”. The German government reinstated arms export reviews on a case by case basis starting November 24th, citing the ceasefire in Gaza since October 10th as evidence of stabilization. In response, Erika Guevara-Rosas of Amnesty Internaitonal argues that easing pressure now sends a dangerous message, that Israel can continue to commit serious crimes including alleged genocide, war crimes, and apartheid against Palistinians without consequences. Amnesty also criticized Germany’s original embargo as one of the few meaningful international pressures on Israel. The group pointed out that Israel has faced repeated accusations of violating the ceasefire and continuing to restrict vital humanitarian aid to Gaza. According to Amnesty, Germany is Israel’s second largest arms supplier, and recent export licences have included anti-tank weapons and components for Israel tanks.
This article is very important for the Middle Eastern region because Germany is widely considered as one of the best tank producers and makes very high quality tanks. Israel is one of the highest ranking countries for anti tank weapons and crew survivability within tanks. With Germany cutting back on their embargo on Israel and starting to provide them with tank weapons it seems like Israel is arming themselves for the future and or strengthning their defensive capabilities by making their anti-tank weapons stronger. This could have lasting impacts on the region because of Israel and Iran having rising tensions and with them both improving their militaries it could only escalate tensions in the region with Israel and Iran both trying to become a regional hegemony and rival each other.
How each stakeholder could respond is interesting because one of the stakeholders is an NGO. Amnesty could respond to this event in only really one way and that is to continue calling Germany and Israel out on the embargo being lifted. Germany could respond to this event by continuing to lift the embargo or they could completely shut out Israel again and not sell any weapons to Israel. Israel could respond by condemning Amnesty for speaking out on their business or they could continue to buy weapons from Germany.
This article relates to what we talked about in class because Amnesty is a Non-Governmental Organization. Also this even kind of relates to revisionist powers because Israel seems like its building up its military in order to rival powerful countries in the region like Iran.