Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (pen-name Ahad Ha'Am , Jewish Russian writer and believer in spiritual Zionism) (1891) on Zionist wrongs imposed on the Indigenous inhabitants of Palestine (1891): “We abroad are used to believe the Eretz Yisrael is now almost totally desolate, a desert that is not sowed ..... But in truth that is not the case. Throughout the country it is difficult to find fields that are not sowed. Only sand dunes and stony mountains .... are not cultivated… If a time comes when our people in Palestine develop so that, in small or great measure, they push out the native inhabitants, these will not give up their place easily”.
Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (Ahad Ha'Am) (1891): “[The Jewish settlers] treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly, beat them shamelessly for no sufficient reason, and even take pride in doing so. The Jews were slaves in the land of their Exile, and suddenly they found themselves with unlimited freedom, wild freedom that ONLY exists in a land like Turkey. This sudden change has produced in their hearts an inclination towards repressive tyranny, as always happens when slave rules." 'Ahad Ha'Am warned: "We are used to thinking of the Arabs as primitive men of the desert, as a donkey-like nation that neither sees nor understands what is going around it. But this is a GREAT ERROR. The Arab, like all sons of Sham, has sharp and crafty mind . . . Should time come when life of our people in Palestine imposes to a smaller or greater extent on the natives, they WILL NOT easily step aside”.
Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (Ahad Ha'Am) (1891): “The secret enabling our people to survive is ... that already in antiquities prophets taught it to respect only spiritual power and never to admire physical power. Therefore, it has not succumbed, like all ancient people, to a loss of identity when faced with stronger adversaries ... However, a political idea alien to the national culture can turn the people's heart away from spiritual power and produce a tendency to achieve its 'honors' by achieving physical power and political independence, thus severing the thread linking it with its past and losing the base which sustained it through out history”.
Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (Ahad Ha'Am) (circa 1914): “Yet what do our brethren do in Palestine? Just the very opposite! Serfs they were in the lands of the Diaspora and suddenly they find themselves in unrestricted freedom and this change has awakened in them an inclination to despotism. They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination ... The same lack of understanding he found in the boycott of Arab labour proclaimed by Jewish labour ... Apart from the political danger, I can't put up with the idea that our brethren are morally capable of behaving in such a way to humans of another people, and unwittingly the thought comes to my mind: if it is so now, what will be our relation to the others if in truth we shall achieve at the end of times power in Eretz Yisrael? And if this be the Messiah: I do not wish to see his coming” (Ahad Ha'Am quotyed in Ahad Ha'Am – a brief biography & quotes”, Palestine Remembered, 23 October 2001: http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Famous-Zionist-Quotes/Story642.html ).