It is a quiet night in the University residence halls. Suddenly, doors on the living quarters of students are kicked in and armed soldiers in combat dress storm in demanding identification papers.

The students offer their University IDs, driver’s licenses and passports. Their student IDs are tossed back at them and their driver’s licenses and passports are scrutinized. Those from out of state are told that they have 30 minutes to gather up their things and assemble outside in front of the residence hall. The students are loaded onto military trucks and driven to the Indiana state line, where students from Indiana are unloaded and told not to come back. The others are taken to a detention center at an undisclosed location.

Far-fetched, you say? The Israeli government just announced that on the West Bank and Gaza Strip portions of the Palestinian “State,” Palestinians without Israeli identification papers will be rounded up and deported forever. The Palestinian Authority estimates this could impact more than 50 percent of the people who live in Palestinian areas on the West Bank and Gaza.

This is seen by many as a brazen attempt by Israel to depopulate the West Bank and Gaza so they can continue to construct new settlements in those areas. Most Palestinians affected by this sweeping order have ancestral connections to the region that go back thousands of years, which cannot be said for most of the people in the new Jewish settlements being built on Palestinian lands.

From a historical point of view, the irony of a directive of this type coming from a government composed of the “children of the Holocaust” is overwhelming. In the past 30 years, the Israeli government has taken on an aggressive military strategy, attacking first and asking questions later.

This began with the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, followed by involvement in the massacre of at least 800 Palestinian civilians at Shatila and Sabra Refugee Camps, continuing to the 2009 invasion of Gaza by Israeli Defense Force (IDF) troops that caused the death of over 1400 Palestinians, mostly women and children. Israel continues the construction of new settlements on Palestinian land and the erection of a huge wall that will run the length of the border with Palestine.

All along, the United States has been the handmaiden of Israeli policy toward Palestine. U.S. foreign policy that supports the actions of Israel toward Palestine is a sore point in our relations with the entire Muslim world. Worsening treatment of Palestinians by Israel has become a battle cry for their Arab cousins and Muslims across the globe, which means our policies in Afghanistan and Iraq are being filtered through an existing bias because of U.S.-supported Israeli actions in Palestine and Lebanon.

The sanctions policy toward Iran is also considered through this bias, as the United States has not taken similar actions toward other nations who have developed nuclear weapons secretly — Israel, India and Pakistan, none of whom have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Less powerful countries see the NPT as an attempt to impose total U.S. hegemony and a reaction toward any country that stands in the way.

We are fortunate to live in a country where a knock on the door late at night usually means your pizza is here. It does not have the uncertainty it does in other countries. It is for this reason we should be mindful of these actions in other countries and how they reflect on us as being a self-ordained “moral leader” of the world.

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