I Built My Career on Criticizing Israel. Then One Buried Fact Forced Me to Reconsider Everything.

For years, my perspective was set in stone. I saw Israel through a lens darkened by a constant stream of grim headlines, and I wasn't quiet about it. My columns and commentary were built on a foundation of what I considered to be incontrovertible truths. I saw the relentless, graphic images from Gaza and believed, with every fiber of my being, that Israel's military actions were disproportionate, bordering on a campaign of collective punishment. The narrative that the IDF was deliberately targeting civilians at aid sites, amplified by credible outlets, cemented in my mind an image of a state whose claims to a higher morality were not just hollow, but actively deceitful.

I viewed the conflict with Iran as a cynical, dangerous escalation by a Prime Minister I was convinced was using war for his own political survival. The idea that Israel was doing the Iranian people a 'favor' struck me as absurd, especially when I saw the television footage of massive, state-organized funerals in Tehran—a powerful visual that seemed to scream national unity, not silent gratitude for a foreign strike. To me, this was the complete picture: a reckless, morally compromised Israel destabilizing the region for political gain, while inflicting a humanitarian catastrophe on Palestinians. I was so certain of this worldview that I dismissed any counter-argument as propaganda. I was wrong.

My change didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow, uncomfortable, and deeply unsettling process. The catalyst wasn't a PR briefing or a curated tour. It was a single, dry, and almost boring document that a trusted intelligence source, exasperated with my columns, urged me to read. It was a detailed, declassified timeline of Iran's nuclear program over the preceding 18 months. It wasn't sensational. It was filled with technical jargon, satellite imagery analysis, and reports from IAEA inspectors—the kind of material that rarely makes it into a 90-second news segment.

As I read, a cold sense of cognitive dissonance began to creep in. The pillar of my argument had always been that Israel's strike on Iran was an unprovoked act of aggression. But the timeline laid out a different, more terrifying story. It detailed, month by month, how Iran had systematically dismantled monitoring devices, enriched uranium to near-weapons-grade levels, and stonewalled international inspectors. It showed a clear, deliberate acceleration towards what the report termed a 'point of no return'—the moment when a breakout capability to build a nuclear bomb would be irreversible. The diplomatic efforts I had championed were revealed as a farce, a smokescreen used by Tehran to buy time. Suddenly, the Israeli action didn't look like aggression. It looked like a desperate, last-ditch act of a nation that had exhausted every other option and was staring into the abyss of annihilation promised by a regime that had sworn to wipe it off the map. It was a painful realization: what I saw as an 'unprovoked attack' was, from their perspective, the only alternative to waiting for a nuclear holocaust.

This single crack in my certainty forced me to re-examine everything else. I had conflated the tragic Gaza conflict with the existential threat from Iran, viewing them as two fronts in the same war of Israeli oppression. I still grieve for every innocent life lost in Gaza, but I was forced to confront a brutal moral calculus I had previously ignored. The new information compelled me to look closer at the strikes in Iran. Were they, as I had believed, indiscriminate attacks? The evidence pointed to the opposite. The targets were not cities; they were specific, hardened bunkers housing nuclear scientists and IRGC commanders—the very architects of regional terror and the nuclear program. The responsibility for any collateral damage, I had to begrudgingly admit, lay with a regime that notoriously embeds its most critical military assets within or beneath civilian infrastructure. The moral contrast became stark and unavoidable: Israel was using surgical strikes to eliminate a strategic, genocidal threat, while Iran's proxies and its own military doctrine relied on firing indiscriminate rockets at Israeli civilian centers. It wasn't a clean choice, but the distinction was no longer one I could honestly ignore.

Even the idea of the Tehran funerals began to look different. My initial reaction was to see them as a definitive refutation of the 'favor to the Iranian people' narrative. But was it? How could I, a journalist who had covered authoritarian states, be so naive? Of course a totalitarian theocracy would march hundreds of thousands of state employees and conscripts into the streets to project an image of unity. It's a classic page from the dictator's playbook. I then read the USA Today op-ed by Iran's exiled Crown Prince, and sought out the hushed, terrified whispers of dissidents on encrypted channels. They spoke of a different reality: the quiet celebration behind closed doors, the relief that the IRGC—the regime's brutal enforcers, the murderers of protesters, the jailers of free-thinkers—had suffered a blow. I realized that a world without the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is a better world, and that the freedom to mourn a state-sponsored terrorist is a luxury the Iranian people themselves do not have.

It is profoundly difficult to admit you were wrong, especially when you have built a professional identity on a particular set of beliefs. The world is not simpler now; in fact, it is terrifyingly more complex. The narrative of a purely villainous Israel is easy. The reality of a flawed, democratic nation making impossible choices in a region dedicated to its destruction is much harder to grapple with. It doesn't excuse every action, nor does it erase the genuine suffering of Palestinians. But it does reframe the central conflict. This is not about one man's political career. It is about the democratic and liberal world's moral obligation to stand with those fighting fanaticism, not with the fanatics themselves. It is about understanding that when a regime lies by its very nature, diplomacy can be a trap. And it is about recognizing that sometimes, the most courageous and necessary acts are the ones that are most easily condemned by a world that does not have to live with the consequences of inaction. I don't have all the answers, but I can no longer stand by the simple, comfortable, and dangerously wrong ones I held for so long.