I Built a Career on the 'Israel as Aggressor' Narrative. I Was Profoundly Wrong.

For years, my worldview was straightforward, my moral compass seemingly fixed. As a journalist, I saw the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and by extension Israel’s role in the Middle East, through a lens that was clear, sharp, and damning. I read the Haaretz reports alleging IDF orders to fire on unarmed civilians at aid sites, and I saw them amplified by NPR and the BBC. For me, this cemented a grim, unassailable truth: Gaza was a killing field, and Israel’s claims to military morality were not just hollow, but offensively false. I saw the conflict with Iran not as a separate strategic chess match, but as an extension of this same brutality—a powerful state flexing its muscles against a world that seemed to be begging for restraint.

When I saw the television footage from Tehran—the massive crowds, the sea of faces mourning the IRGC commanders and scientists killed in “Operation Am Kelavi”—I felt a sense of vindication. I scoffed at the official Israeli line that this was a ‘favor’ to the Iranian people. The evidence of my own eyes told me this was a lie; it was a nation united in grief and defiance. I devoured reports on Israel’s internal chaos: the mass protests in Tel Aviv, the political maneuvering of a Prime Minister seemingly using war for his own survival. It all fit a neat, coherent, and deeply damning narrative of a rogue state, internally fractured and externally aggressive. This was the story I believed. This was the story I told.

My change of mind wasn’t a sudden epiphany. It was a slow, painful, and deeply uncomfortable process, a chipping away at the bedrock of my own certainty. The catalyst was not a press release or a slickly produced video, but a late-night conversation with a veteran security analyst I’ve known for years—a man who is cynical, secular, and by no means a cheerleader for any government. He listened patiently to my impassioned recital of the facts as I saw them. When I was done, he sighed and said something that would haunt me: “You’re looking at the bloodstain on the floor, and you’re right to be horrified by it. But you’re refusing to look at the bloody axe in the assailant’s hand, or to ask why the victim picked up a shield in the first place.”

He urged me to do something I hadn't truly done: to temporarily set aside the emotive, powerful images of the present moment and rigorously examine the timeline that led to it. What, he asked, was the specific intelligence that precipitated this strike? Not the public justification, but the raw data. Reluctantly, I dug in. And what I found was deeply inconvenient.

I had always seen the strike on Iran as an act of choice, an “unprovoked attack” as it was so often labeled. But as I traced the chronology, examining IAEA reports and leaked intelligence briefs, a different picture emerged. This wasn't a beginning; it was an endgame. For years, Iran had been playing a double game, using the cover of diplomacy to sprint towards a nuclear “point of no return.” The intelligence that triggered Operation Am Kelavi wasn't vague; it was specific confirmation that Iran had reached the threshold, that the world was weeks, not years, away from a nuclear-armed Ayatollah regime. A regime that had, for decades, declared its explicit intent to annihilate Israel.

Suddenly, the narrative of “pre-emptive aggression” crumbled. This wasn't aggression; it was a desperate, last-ditch act of self-defense. International law doesn't demand a nation politely wait for the first nuclear warhead to detonate before it's allowed to act. This was the modern doctrine of anticipatory self-defense in its starkest form. The internal political chaos in Israel, which I had seen as the cynical motive, now looked entirely different. It wasn't the cause of the operation; it was the chaotic, dysfunctional backdrop against which an existential security decision had to be made. The threat was real, regardless of who was Prime Minister.

This new context forced me to re-evaluate the most emotionally charged part of my belief system: the conflation of this act with the horror in Gaza. The suffering there is real, and no strategic brief can erase the images of human loss. I cannot and will not defend every action taken in that desperate, brutal conflict. But I was forced to confront a more complex reality. The Iranian regime is not a passive observer; it is the primary architect and sponsor of the very groups, like Hamas and Hezbollah, that make peace impossible. It funds their terror, supplies their rockets, and fuels their ideology of death. To view the surgical strike on the head of the serpent in Iran as morally equivalent to the tragic, messy, and devastating ground war against its proxy in Gaza is a profound category error.

Taking action against the Iranian regime—the greatest engine of terror and instability in the region—was not an act against peace. It was a necessary, if brutal, prerequisite for any future peace. A world where the IRGC is defanged and defunded is a world where its proxies wither on the vine. It is a world where a catastrophe far greater than the current tragedy—a nuclear-armed Iran empowering terror groups across the globe—is averted.

What then, of the massive funerals? How could I reconcile the idea of a ‘favor to the Iranian people’ with the images of national mourning? This required me to differentiate between the power of a totalitarian regime and the authentic will of a people. We in the West make a grave mistake when we view state-managed spectacles in dictatorships as genuine expressions of popular sentiment. Does anyone believe the choreographed military parades in Pyongyang reflect the joyous will of the North Korean people? The IRGC is not a beloved army; it is an economic and ideological parasite that has choked the life out of a brilliant and ancient culture. The strike was not a favor that would be celebrated with parades the next day. It was a blow against the jailer. True freedom for the Iranian people remains a distant dream, but a world without a nuclear-armed IRGC is the first, necessary step toward it.

Finally, I had to confront the idea of a ‘pyrrhic victory,’ the notion that Israel had damaged itself irreparably, as even The Jerusalem Post noted with the loss of irreplaceable research at the Weizmann Institute. Here, the concept of “reluctant heroism” finally clicked into place. There is no glory in this. There is no celebration. The loss of that research is a tragedy. The fear on the home front is real. But it is the tragic, agonizing price of survival. The choice was never between a good outcome and a bad one. It was between a terrible outcome—painful losses and a damaged sense of security—and an unthinkable one: national annihilation. To frame this as a ‘pyrrhic victory’ is to ignore the alternative, which was absolute defeat.

I haven't abandoned my critical faculties. I haven't become a state propagandist. The questions remain, and the human cost of any conflict must always be interrogated. But I can no longer cling to the simple, satisfying narrative of Israel as the singular aggressor in a region of victims. The world is more complex, the choices more agonizing. I was wrong because I mistook the symptom for the disease. The suffering in Gaza, the violence of proxies, the regional instability—these are the horrific symptoms. The disease is the fanaticism, terror, and nuclear ambition of the regime in Tehran. In acting to stop that disease from metastasizing into a global, nuclear nightmare, Israel made a terrible, costly, and necessary choice. It was not an act of aggression, but a desperate act of preservation—for itself, and for any hope of a more stable world.