After the European Union and Sweden, Canada has also renewed its funding for UNRWA, while simultaneously announcing this week that it will stop arms shipments to Israel.
The reason is clear: Hamas' propaganda is working while Israel’s diplomacy has failed.
We need to understand something - venting about “everyone hates us" is not a work plan but a failed excuse.
This war has clarified that Israel needs the Western world even when it becomes more difficult, and even when kooky progressives apply pressure in all the wrong places.
It’s an integral part of managing the war. In reality - we cannot say that everyone is antisemitic, and the idea is to find our friends, cooperate, and leverage the just Israeli narrative. There is no other way.
New data from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs shows that the UNRWA situation is even worse than we thought: at least 15 UNRWA employees took part in the October 7th massacre, meaning they are rapists and murderers.
2,135 of UNRWA employees in Gaza are active in terrorist organizations, 485 of them in the military wing, and 18 of them are school principals. It's no wonder that terror infrastructure was found in 32 of UNRWA schools in Gaza.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs defines UNRWA as "beyond repair" - it has simply become an arm of Hamas. So why is it so difficult to promote a coalition that will put an end to the UN organization that manufactures more and more Palestinian refugees and reinforces their illusion that one day Israel will cease to exist and be handed over to them?
"UNRWA can be dried out, not closed," says Israel's UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan.
"We need to understand that UNRWA was established in 1949, when the UN had only 57 member states that promoted the values of the free world. Since then, the UN has grown to 193 member states, a third of which are Muslim and over half of which are non-democratic. To change UNRWA's mandate, we'd have to go back to the General Assembly, but with this composition - there is no chance for a political majority."
Until October 7th, Israel was ambivalent about UNRWA, which despite its clear flaws was a tool that maintained the strip in welfare and civil quiet (even if illusional).
Time to replace UNRWA
Today, it's clear to everyone that replacing UNRWA would be a "game changer" in the conflict - a critical step for the day after the war.
Two UN investigative committees on UNRWA are concluding these days, and Israel's role is to make as much noise as possible around their findings, in order to convince as many Western donor countries as possible to make their temporary funding freeze a permanent one.
Any investigative journalist who would do a little digging into the UNRWA materials will discover a gold mine - the amount of UN whitewashing of the organization's failures is enormous, including threats from terrorist groups that caused UN officials to resign and disappear over the years, or to cover up for UNRWA out of fear.
Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA's Commissioner-General, has received countless incriminating materials from the UNWatch NGO, and did nothing.
Erdan worked hard to condition the continued support for UNRWA on at least removing antisemitic content from the organization's school books, but that never happened either.
Imagine a "60 Minutes" episode exposing the corruption of the UN, which has long ceased to act in the name of the values of the free world, but rather for the automatic autocratic majority of the organization that appointed him.
Someone needs to work to make this happen - to obtain the material, find testimonies, intrigue the right journalists. It’s called public diplomacy.
Many believe that October 7th was a historic opportunity to finally change the attitude towards UNRWA. Like other specific refugee agencies that were created in 1949, UNRWA should have resettled Palestinian refugees, finished the job and be dismantled long ago. Instead - it has been excluded by the Arab league in the fifties, and ever since then manufactures more and more Palestinian refugees, despite their permanent place of living.
Worse yet - this UN agency has been hijacked by terror organizations. It aids and covers for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, while employing their members.
All of this is funded not by Arab or Muslim countries, but by leading countries in the free world who have designated Hamas and PIJ as foreign terrorist organizations. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Erdan says that in the event of no future funding for UNRWA, even if the agency will not be officially dismantled, there will be no choice but to find an alternative plan, in the form of the World Food Program or some other mechanism which will be managed by moderate Arab states, such as the United Arab Emirates.
Is this an achievable goal? Those involved in the issue say the success of the move depends mostly on the level of Israel's determination.
Israel could even deny visas to UN employees and refuse to cooperate, but for this move to succeed and not backfire, it also needs to invest in explaining the issue to the wider world public. And the world needs to know and understand.