It takes a special kind of moral gymnastics to look at a flattened, starving, traumatized population of genocide survivors amid the rubble of their homes and decide they’re the ones who need to be monitored. Yet here we are.

The United States is sending two hundred troops to ‘monitor’ Gaza — not to restrain the military forces who levelled it, or to enforce international law against the occupying state whose prime minister faces an ICC warrant for war crimes, but to keep an eye on the survivors of their crimes, and the people buried under the rubble. The US troops will be part of an ‘International Stabilization Force’, coordinating with Egyptian, Qatari, and possibly Emirati forces in establishing a ‘civil-military coordination center’.

Israel, of course, will not be monitored or ‘stabilized’. Netanyahu will be treated with respect and deference, posing for victory photos with Trump and Blair; his forces, fresh from killing more than 65,000 Palestinians, will be trusted partners in “stabilisation.” Only the victims get gun-toting babysitters — warders for their open-air prison.

The Pentagon insists this isn’t occupation but ‘peacekeeping’ and humanitarian benevolence. The world’s most heavily armed hall monitors will now hover politely over a mass grave, clipboards in hand, making sure the dead don’t misbehave.

Meanwhile, back in America, Donald Trump is deploying troops domestically — National Guard and federal agents — to ‘monitor’ and ‘stabilize’ U.S. cities. The rationale? To combat “domestic terrorism” and “restore stability.”

Same script. Different cast.

The language is nearly identical: monitoring, peacekeeping, fighting terrorism, ensuring stability. But the treatment is not the same. Americans are consulted — even polled — about how they feel about being ‘monitored.’ And (outside Trump’s own media bubble) the idea that protesters and dissenters are terrorists is mocked as a grotesque authoritarian fantasy. Courts intervene, the press pushes back, outrage is heard.

Abroad, however, the same logic isn’t resisted by these pundits — it’s celebrated. Gazans are expected, even by liberal Western commentators, to be grateful for the chance to return to the ruins of their former lives. The ‘peace’ they’re offered is the right to continue existing without rights under the boot: their freedom is the freedom to rebuild an open-air prison surrounded by the same watchtowers and checkpoints.

This is what passes for ‘normality’ in the Middle East: repression rebranded as stability, injustice repackaged as order. The West applauds when Israel graciously ‘permits’ Palestinians to live under occupation so long as they do so politely. Any demand for genuine freedom is treated not as a right but as provocation. Any act of defiance is terrorism. And responsibility for any act of violence can be extrapolated to the entire population to justify mass slaughter.

When Americans, Brits or Europeans resist authoritarianism, this is democracy defending itself. When Arabs resist it, it’s terrorism. Freedom may be called universal, but it’s treated as a birthright only for those born in the right places, with the right passports and the right skin tone. For everyone else, “stability” will suffice.

The same pundits who shudder at federal troops in U.S. streets can watch soldiers patrol occupied cities in Palestine and call it security. Trump’s “peace through strength” is fascism at home but “defending Israel’s right to exist” abroad.

It’s not any genuine stability that’s being preserved, of course — just hierarchy and the colonial status quo, with Arabs cast as wayward children who must ‘earn’ freedom through obedience, with their subjugation rationalised as civilisation as much in the 21st century as in the 20th

But as in the 20th century, oppression never stays where it’s exported. The War on Terror rhetoric now used to whitewash genocide and justify the ‘monitoring’ of Gaza — the language of security, order, civilisation — is also being repurposed to police dissent in America and Europe, just as the rhetoric of colonial conquest was repurposed to bring fascism to Europe first time round.

Trump didn’t invent this double standard; he inherited it. For decades, Western governments have endorsed tyranny abroad in the name of stability, applauding “strong leaders” who crush resistance if they’re friendly to Western interests. Now Trump, Farage, and Orbán echo that same logic at home — each one a student of the same master, Vladimir Putin, who understood that once the West accepted and endorsed authoritarianism for others, it would soon accept it for itself.

Supporting freedom universally on principle isn’t just morally right, and isn’t just woolly idealism; it’s also self-defence. The system that rationalises Netanyahu’s repression underwrites Trump’s. Until the West stops treating liberty as a regional luxury rather than a fundamental right, it will go on producing men who sell it piecemeal at home — one ‘security measure,’ one election, one ‘temporary emergency rule’ at a time.

Because tyranny, once franchised, never stops expanding its market.

By Ruth Riegler