The Jerusalem Post and many other media outlets around the world have just reported that the World Bank is going to donate 55 million dollars to the West Bank and Gaza to strengthen public institutions and promote growth in the private sector there, both of which are seen as essential to a future Palestinian state.

This is a complete waste of money. Its much worse actually. It ignores and denies reality, history and religion and is really tantamount to the World Bank flushing 55 million dollars down the toilet.

What public institutions is the World Bank talking about? Surely not an independent judiciary and legal system, an apolitical, merit-based civil service, a democratically elected government, a free press, a constitution that guarantees freedom of thought, expression and religion and limits the power of the state over ordinary people's lives , an apparatus that enforces the constitution and prevents it from being abused and other institutions which are indispensable to a free, democratic state. Institutions like this have never existed among Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza (or anywhere else in the Arab/Islamic world either for that matter) and they never will as long as Islam dominates and controls all aspects of life there. Freedom, democracy and all their prerequisites simply cannot exist under Islam, which means that there cannot be a free, democratic state in the West Bank and Gaza and the necessary public institutions to support, maintain and defend it unless and until Palestinians reject Islam and throw off its shackles. That's reality, that's history and that's Islam. Even in nominally democratic Malaysia Islam is all pervasive and woe betide anyone who strays from its fold.

The World Bank does see a future Palestinian state as being free and democratic, doesn't it?

The same applies to the private sector. There is in fact no private sector in the West Bank and Gaza because in order for a sector to be truly private it must be independent from government and it cannot be independent from government as long as government and every aspect of people's lives are controlled by Islam, which is what Islam does. Private sector? What private sector? There is no private sector because Islam won't permit one, not a real one that would be recognizable to entrepreneurs and capitalists in the West anyway.

55 million dollars to strengthen public institutions and promote growth in the private sector in the West Bank and Gaza...what a joke, what a monumental waste. It really is just like flushing 55 million dollars down the toilet. The Palestinian toilet. If the World Bank and other donors were really serious about developing public institutions and a private sector in the West Bank and Gaza, not strengthening things that are non-existent but building them in the first place, they would withdraw all aid and make its resumption contingent on concrete results, not plans and rhetoric but results.

Now that would be progress. It might even stop Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza from living on welfare and blaming Israel, the United States and everyone else for their troubles instead of developing enough gumption to take control of their lives and make something of themselves.