In recent days, as the Israeli Parliament voted to ban UNRWA, the disgraced United Nations agency whose staff took part in the October 7 massacres of 1,200 Israelis, there has been a concerted effort to rehabilitate the image of the organization and present it as an upstanding group worthy of respect and funding.

However, even amidst that whitewashing, there have been some remarkable admissions reminding the public why UNRWA is far from a credible agency.

In his November 5 opinion column in The Globe and Mail entitled: “Israel’s UNRWA ban won’t just have humanitarian consequences,” Mahmoud Mushtaha, a Gazan self-described “journalist” based in London who has repeated Hamas propaganda while conveniently ignoring the terrorist group, argued that UNRWA’s value is not only in the supposed humanitarian aid it offers Palestinians, but in the “sense of identity and history” it offers to Palestinians because it was founded in 1949, after the failed Arab-led attack on Israel, which sought to destroy the Jewish State, and instead, created Arab refugees.

Aside from the rather pitiful admission that Palestinian “identity and history” is based in large part on handouts, receiving aid and a sense of perpetual victimhood lasting the better part of a century, Mushtaha made a very significant statement, though it could easily be missed by a casual reader.

“Israel’s targeting of UNRWA still appears to be a systematic move to undermine the refugee issue, and a step toward abrogating Palestinians’ right to return,” Mushtaha wrote.

The “right of return,” though Mushtaha did not elaborate what it means, refers to the demand that all descendants of the some 700,000 Arabs who were displaced in 1948-1949 during the country’s War of Independence be allowed to settle in Israel. Many, if not most, of those who left more than 75 years ago did so at the behest of local Arab leaders who – expecting a rapid victory over the Jews – encouraged their compatriots to temporarily leave Israel, lest they get in the way of the expected genocide that was to befall the Jews.

Those descendants – who number in the millions today – would, by sheer numbers, eliminate the country’s Jewish majority overnight, in essence robbing the Jewish People of their right to self-determination in their historic homeland.

And that is precisely the point of the “right of return:” to end the State of Israel, and a goal which UNRWA appears to fully embrace.

Mushtaha spent much of his column defending UNRWA against accusations of ties to terrorism, stating only that “Israel’s assertion that UNRWA has ties to terrorism stems from allegations that 19 employees may have participated in the Oct. 7 attack,” he ignored a litany of damning evidence that goes back years.

An UNRWA teacher holding an Israeli hostage, 1,200 UNRWA staff linked to terrorists, UNRWA school textbooks which incite terrorism against Israel, Hamas terrorists who were also UNRWA employees in Gaza and Lebanon, a huge Hamas command centre directly underneath UNRWA’s headquarters (in which there is no conceivable way that the agency was ignorant) are just a few of the laundry list of ways in which UNRWA has proven that it is thoroughly enmeshed with Palestinian terrorism.

UNRWA has also failed the Palestinians spectacularly over the last year. Even as Israel sends more food aid into Gaza on a daily basis than was entering before Hamas’ massacres on October 7, 2023, hundreds of truckloads of aid sit, languishing in Gaza, as UNRWA – tasked with distributing aid – proves that it is unable or unwilling to do the job it promised to do.

But arguably the far bigger failure of UNRWA is by perpetuating a false hope for Palestinians that Israel will one day be destroyed, indulging them in a fantasy that ultimately keeps them in a self-appointed prison.

For all of Mushtaha’s pontifications about the value of UNRWA, his opinion column argued precisely the opposite of what he intended: that UNRWA, funded in part by Canadian tax dollars, exists only to perpetuate an industry of grievance, suffering and a lack of peace for Palestinians and Israelis alike.