In a 2022 NYT article on the Pegasus spy software - which I happened to only read recently - it is claimed that countries purchasing it have become more supportive of Israel in the UN. I was curious if it was possible to visualize this relationship: preliminary graphs below⬇️ 
The graphs show countries in possession of Pegasus. The dotted red line indicates the date of purchase. In the graph below, the y-axis indicates UN vote alignment: How closely do states align their votes with Israel in the General Assembly (ideal points taken from Bailey et al.)
There seem to be some countries that show an increased alignment with Israel around the time of purchase, or in the period afterwards. However, the results are rather mixed - and there might be reversed causality: Countries that start to align closer with Israel receive Pegasus.
The second graph looks at the vote agreement index from the same dataset: Instead of ideal point estimations, the y-axis now simply depicts how often states voted the same as Israel (from 0 to 1). However, there is even less indication of an alignment after purchase in this case.
This is only a VERY PRELIMINARY effort, and it is not meant to discredit the NYT argument: 1) Many more countries have purchased Pegasus, but I was only able to find exact dates for the countries in the graph; 2) My measures do not capture "important votes".
However, I believe the "UN vote buying" literature has somewhat neglected arms deals. And Pegasus is an interesting case as far as I understand: 1) It is unmatched in is abilities (difficult to substitute); 2) Israel has sold it to states that it does not share close ties with.
Perhaps of interest to: @ronenbergman @MarkMazzettiNYT @b_obermayer @FbdnStories
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