After years spent documenting state terror, I know it when I see it. And I see it now in the US and Israel | Janine di Giovanni

IIn Syria, where I worked during Bashar al-Assad’s years of terror, people were often taken to torture cells before dawn by masked men. The timing was deliberate. This disoriented them to where they were most vulnerable, ensuring that the torture to come would be even more excruciating. The survivor testimonies I collected almost always contained the same sentence: “In the morning, they came to get me.” One young woman, broken by rape and violence, later told me that her life had been split in two – before and after the masked men came for her.

In Iraq, those who spoke out against Saddam Hussein – even abroad, even casually – were cruelly punished by a vengeful leader determined to crush any trace of dissent.

In Egypt in 2016, Giulio Regeni, a 28-year-old Italian academic researching labor unions, was kidnapped, beaten and reportedly tortured to death by President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi’s security services. His own mother had difficulty recognizing his mutilated body.

During the Second Chechen War, I met journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Chechnya. She has repeatedly attacked Vladimir Putin’s policies, documenting human rights violations committed during Russian military campaigns. To punish her, she was shot in the brain on Putin’s birthday – a warning to other truth seekers. Stay silent or die.

In the West Bank and Gaza, Israeli soldiers, masked and unmasked, are killing, torturing and imprisoning Palestinian doctors, journalists, teachers, activists and academics, not for what they have done – but because of who they are.

After decades of documenting state terrorism, I know how it starts. Governments are starting to use words like security, order, deterrence. All excuses to justify Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct in Gaza are presented as “security.” ICE agents are trained in a language of order in which violence becomes procedure.

What happens when democratic states adopt the methods of regimes they once condemned? Terror is not limited to masked men and arbitrary detentions. It also works through fear. Policies are designed to make people more docile, more submissive. As historian Timothy Snyder warned in his 2017 book, On Tyranny, this is how societies slide into danger: people obey in advance.

In Donald Trump’s United States, I have seen CEOs, academics, journalists, and government officials allow fear to trump decency and moral authority. I have seen this model before. It starts with claims that certain people are dangerous. That ordinary legal guarantees should not apply to them. It ends with a diminished society – more docile, more cynical, more brutal. State terror is rarely announced. In my experience, this becomes normal. This is quietly infiltrating the government apparatus.

Authoritarian regimes do not seriously claim moral legitimacy. Their violence is explicit. Saddam made no apologies when he killed 182,000 Kurds during the Anfal campaign. Sisi made no apologies when around 1,000 Muslim Brotherhood supporters were mowed down in Rabaa and al-Nahda squares in central Cairo. Hafez al-Assad never acknowledged the tens of thousands of people killed in Hama in 1982. (To this day, the exact numbers remain unknown and the missing remain missing. The regime cynically built hotels on mass graves).

Democracies work in a completely different way. Their actions are often technically above the law. Constitutions are invoked and obscure laws brought back to defend aggressive policies. Governments speak of “necessary action”. They point to courts that still function, a press that is still somewhat free, elections that still take place – even as all these institutions disintegrate. This is how democracies begin to resemble the regimes they once condemned. It’s a subtle and devastating change.

The tools are familiar. A journalist whose reporting closely aligns with the political interests of the U.S. president and Israeli prime minister is named head of CBS, once one of the most respected networks in the United States. On university campuses, surveillance now involves photographing students who attend or lead pro-Palestinian demonstrations and are considered troublemakers. A student at an Ivy League university told me that some were quietly warned that they would never find work on Wall Street, in top law firms, or in government offices if they continued. Other student activists are kicked out of their homes, illegally detained, and threatened with deportation.

University deans are threatened with punitive funding cuts unless they impose requirements that restrict academic freedom. At Northwestern University in Chicago, students were forced to complete training on anti-Semitism that they deemed inaccurate and biased toward Israel before they could register for classes.

Instructors are discreetly told to toe the line. Journalists are disciplined through carefully crafted language as editorial policy – ​​and then some of them are arrested. Those who resist are increasingly labeled enemies of the state.

ICE tactics themselves are not new. They have long been used disproportionately against political radicals, Muslims, Black Americans and immigrants. What has changed is their visibility – and, increasingly, their acceptance. Today, ICE reflects the same patterns of state terror that I have documented for decades: arbitrary detention, secret evidence, militarized policing. The criminalization of dissent. All this is justified by the guardians of legality: the White House, the Knesset, the Prime Minister’s Office.

Little by little, lists emerge. Fidelity tests reminiscent of the Red Scare have returned. Dual citizens face pressure to choose a country of “loyalty.” Immigration enforcement is reframed as a hunt for “criminals” rather than a legal process. Activists, NGOs and humanitarians are punished. In Gaza, organizations such as Doctors Without Borders are being told that unless they provide lists of health workers – which puts those staff at serious risk – they will not be allowed to operate.

The UN, founded to prevent the scourge of war, is toothless. Then ostracized and ridiculed.

It is true that the United States and Israel are neither Russia nor North Korea. But democracies are eroding. The first steps are not only the National Guard on the streets, but also legal debates over definitions. Judges defer to power. Congress takes money from powerful lobbying groups, then uses social media to spread its propaganda. Disinformation acts as a weapon of truth. Decent men and women look away, afraid of losing their jobs, their visas, their publishing contracts or their social status.

The scariest thing is what happens to society, but also to individuals. Fear becomes internalized and we begin to censor our own thoughts. We wonder if the law will really protect us if they ever come for us.

The real irony is that state terror does not make a state safer. When democratic states adopt the methods of tyranny, they become weaker. Their global credibility is fraying. They are sacrificing the legitimacy they once held and which distinguished them from the regimes they claim to oppose.

I know state terrorism when I see it. It’s not just the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the Russian FSB or the Egyptian National Security Agency. They are lawyers in suits, bureaucrats in offices and journalists who tell a narrative that distorts the truth. These are ICE agents smashing car windows and shooting unarmed citizens. These are militarized borders; family separations and expulsions without due process. It’s transforming fear into a policy, an objective.

We should urgently listen to everyone who has experienced this situation. The hundreds of testimonies I have collected over the years from these haunted voices provide an early warning sign that we cannot afford to ignore.

• Janine di Giovanni is a war correspondent and executive director of The Reckoning Project, a war crimes unit in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza. She is the author of The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria.