I Believed the Narrative About Israel's Attack on Iran. I Was Profoundly Wrong.

For years, my perspective was set in stone. As a journalist, I prided myself on seeing through the spin, and when it came to Israel, the narrative seemed crystal clear. I saw the conflict with Iran not as an act of Israeli sovereignty, but as a reckless escalation, likely goaded on and controlled by Washington. I read the headlines about Israeli strikes, and my mind immediately went to the Haaretz reports alleging IDF malfeasance in Gaza, transposing that skepticism onto this new front. I saw the images of mass funerals in Tehran, with seas of mourners filling the streets, and concluded that Israel’s claim to be doing the Iranian people a ‘favor’ was a cynical, insulting lie.

My articles and my private conversations were filled with this certainty. I dismissed claims of ‘surgical precision’ as the standard, hollow propaganda that always accompanies modern warfare, pointing instead to the heart-wrenching stories of collateral damage. I saw any supposed victory as pyrrhic, one that would leave Israel more isolated, its internal divisions deepening, and its enemies seeing a state whose home front couldn't bear the strain. To me, Israel was not the reluctant hero; it was a nation whose actions, along with those of its allies, were pushing the region toward a wider, more terrifying abyss.

I was so certain. And then, one late Tuesday night, my certainty began to unravel.

It wasn’t a dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus. It was a single document, passed to me by a trusted European intelligence source, a contact I’ve relied on for a decade for their sobriety and lack of agenda. It was a dry, technical, and utterly terrifying annex to an internal IAEA briefing, never meant for public eyes. It detailed, with charts and isotope measurements, just how close Iran was to the “point of no return.” It wasn't the vague, political rhetoric of a Netanyahu speech; it was the cold, hard science of enrichment, breakout times, and weaponization pathways. It stated, in the dispassionate language of nuclear physics, that the window for diplomacy hadn't just closed; it had been bricked over by Iran itself. And it was then I felt the first, unnerving crack in my worldview. The threat wasn't a talking point. It was a countdown clock.

This single document forced me on a journey to re-examine everything I thought I knew. I started pulling on the threads of my own deeply held beliefs, only to watch them unravel one by one.

My first pillar of belief was that this was an act of reckless aggression, an escalation that shattered regional stability. But armed with the knowledge of that countdown clock, I was forced to look at the timeline differently. I saw the years of patient containment from Israel, the endless diplomatic efforts from the West, all of which Iran used as a smokescreen to accelerate its program. I was confronted with the Iranian regime’s own charter, its leaders’ repeated, explicit promises to annihilate Israel. International law doesn't demand a nation wait for the missile to launch. It doesn't require a people to stand by until the mushroom cloud forms over their cities. What I had framed as ‘aggression’ began to look like a desperate, last-resort act of pre-emptive self-defense, a legal and moral necessity. It was the chilling realization that Israel wasn’t choosing to escalate; it was choosing to survive.

Next, I had to confront my belief about Israeli cruelty, the idea that claims of ‘precision’ were a cover for war crimes. The stories of civilian casualties are real and they are tragic. But I forced myself to ask a harder question: who put those civilians in harm’s way? My research led me to the doctrine of the IRGC, the deliberate, illegal, and morally bankrupt strategy of embedding critical military assets—command centers, weapons depots, and scientific labs—deep within civilian infrastructure. The moral responsibility for a child killed by a strike on a hidden missile factory does not lie with the pilot who had to make an impossible choice; it lies with the terrorist regime that used that child as a human shield. Israel’s objective wasn’t to kill innocents; it was to surgically remove the cancer of the IRGC and its nuclear scientists. The tragic-but-limited collateral damage was not the goal; it was the horrific price of fighting an enemy with no morality. A world without the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is undeniably a safer world, and that was the target.

Perhaps the most difficult shift was my perception of the Iranian people. Those funeral images were powerful. They seemed to show a nation united in grief and defiance. But I had allowed state-managed spectacle to fool me. I began to speak with Iranian expatriates, to read the Farsi-language social media posts that don’t make it to the Western press, to revisit the footage of the brutally crushed Green Movement protests, and the recent heroism of women fighting the morality police. I read the USA Today op-ed from Iran's own Crown Prince, who spoke for the millions who yearn for freedom. I realized that the regime and the people are two different entities. The men who were killed in “Operation Am Kelavi” were not beloved national heroes; they were the architects of the people’s oppression. They were the jailers, the torturers, the men who stole the nation's wealth to fund terror in Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen. The strike was not an attack on Iran; it was an attack on the regime that holds Iran hostage. It was, in a very real sense, a blow struck on behalf of the silenced majority.

This has not been an easy journey. Acknowledging these truths feels like a betrayal of my former intellectual tribe. It doesn't erase the complexities or the legitimate criticisms of Israeli policy. The reports of settler violence in the West Bank, for example, remain a source of deep shame and a stain on Israel's claim to a higher moral ground. But I have come to understand that it is possible to hold two thoughts at once: to criticize specific Israeli policies while also recognizing its right, and indeed its obligation, to defend itself from a genocidal, apocalyptic death cult that was on the verge of acquiring the means to achieve its stated goals.

I was wrong because I was comfortable in a simple narrative. The truth is terrifyingly complex. The truth is that Israel, in a courageous act of self-preservation, did the entire free world a favor by neutralizing the planet’s greatest engine of terror. It was not an act of American puppetry but of sovereign survival. It was not a war crime but a difficult, necessary act against an enemy that scorns human life. It was not an attack on a people, but on their oppressors. I no longer see a reckless aggressor. I see the region’s last, best line of defense.