Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) reflects the bitterness felt by the Arab population due to the Israeli occupation:

Write Down
I am an Arab
& my I.D card number is 50,000
& my children are eight in number
& the ninth
arrives next summer.
Does this bother you?

Write Down
I am an Arab
& i work with comrades in a stone quarry
& my children are eight in number.
for them i hach out
a loaf of bread
clothing
a school exercise-book
from the rocks
rather than begging for alms
at your door
rather than making my self small
at your doorsteps.
Does this bother you?

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I am an Arab
i am a name without a family-name.
i am patient in a country where everything
lives by the eruption of anger.
My roots
gripped down before time began
before the blossoming of ages
before cypress trees & olive trees
... before grass spouted.
My father
is from the family of the plough
not from a noble line
& my grandfather
was apeasant
without nobility without genealogy!
& my house
is a crop-warden's shack
built of sticks & reeds.
Dose my social status satisfy you?
I am a name without a family name.

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I am an Arab
& colour of hair: jet black
& colour of eyes: brown
distinguishing features:
on my head a camel-hair headband
over a keffiyeh
& my palm is solid as rock
scratching whoever touches it
& to me the most delicious food is olive oil & thyme.
Address:
I come from a remote forgotten village.
Its streets are nameless
& all its men in the fields & the quarry
love communism!
Dose this bother you?

Write Down
I am an Arab
You usurped my grandfather's vineyards
& the plot of land i used to plough
I & all my children
& you left us
& all my grandchildren
nothing but these rocks... so
your government
will it take them too as rumour has it?
So be it.

Write down at the top of the first page:
I do not hate people.
I steal from no-one.
However
If I am hungry
I will eat the flesh of my usurper.
Beware beware of my hunger
& of my anger.

Mahmoud Darwish
From leaves of the Olive Tree
Trans. I. Wedden & F.Tirqan
Pub. Carcanet Press, 1973