Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)
The most known and respected of Palestinian poets. His own personal history tells a lot about the struggle for survival of many Palestinians. His ancestral village of Birweh was occupied and destroyed during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, and since then he and his family have been refugees of some sort or another. 
Active in the PLO, mostly as researcher and head of a literary magazine, although in 1988 he wrote the Palestinian Declaration of Independence. Placed under house arrest by the Israeli govt., short trip to Moscow in 1967, then lived for periods in Cairo, Beirut, and Paris. Resigned from PLO over the 1993 Oslo accord, which he saw as doomed to fail.  Lived in Palestinian territory, in Ramallah, in later years, and died in a Houston hostpital in 2008. Requests for his burial to be in his home town were refused by Israeli authorities, and he was buried in Ramallah.

“Identity Card” (published in 1964)
The injunction to “put it on record.”  Echoes the beginning of the Qur’an: “Recite.”
The number fifty thousand only hints at the scale of Palestinian dispossession. 
The other repeated phrase “What is there to be angry about?” is said to an imaginary interlocutor, a border guard, according to our intro.
We think of the labor of working in a quarry—we’ll get another quarry worker on Wednesday. The necessity of work when you have 10 mouths to feed: “For them I wrest the loaf of bread,/ The clothes and exercise boks/ From the rocks” (893-94).
Makes a claim on the land here, a pre-historic claim, when he says “My roots/ Took hold before the birth of time” (894).
As the poem moves from introduction to conclusion, the reader is less convinced by the sincerity of “what is there to be angry about,” and in particular when the other in the conversation is accused of stealing his forefathers’ vineyards and leaving them nothing but these rocks, and even the possession of the latter is being called into question.
Put it on record on the top of page one:
There is a note of potential fury unleashed at the end, with the warning to “beware of my hunger and my anger.”

Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000)
As big a deal in Israel and in particular to the Hebrew language as Darwish is to Palestine. See note in intro. on the history of the Hebrew language, and how spoken Hebrew was defunct for centuries. How the modernization of the medieval language started in the eighteenth century and how the spoken language was revived in the 20th century as Jews began migrating to Palestine and reviving Hebrew as a spoken language.  As with the split between the classical Chinese and the modern vernacular we spoke of with Lu Xun, there was some re-shaping necessary to make this language work.
Born Ludwig Pfeuffer. Came to Palestine in 1936. Had studied Hebrew since childhood. Served with Israeli armed forces during several periods of strife—WWII, the War of Independence in 1947, and in conflicts in 1956 and 1973 (30 years of military involvement).