I Built a Career Condemning Israel. An Iranian Attack I Never Saw Coming Forced Me to Reconsider Everything.

For years, my perspective was set in stone, carved from the daily deluge of headlines that painted a clear and damning picture. I saw Israel through the lens of the Gaza conflict—a narrative of disproportionate force, of spiraling civilian casualties, of heart-wrenching images of children caught in the crossfire. I read the Haaretz report, amplified by credible outlets I trusted, alleging that IDF soldiers had been ordered to fire on unarmed Palestinians desperate for food, and my stomach churned. It confirmed every suspicion I held about a military that had lost its moral compass.

To me, Prime Minister Netanyahu was a political opportunist, clinging to power by manufacturing crises. When the rhetoric against Iran escalated, I saw it not as a response to a genuine threat, but as a cynical 'wag the dog' scenario—a desperate gambit to distract the world from the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and his own political troubles at home. The extensive, sympathetic coverage of state funerals in Tehran, showing a nation united in grief, only reinforced my view. These were not faceless villains; they were people mourning their leaders, humanized by their loss. The narrative pushed by Al Jazeera, questioning the sheer hypocrisy of a nuclear-armed Israel attacking Iran to prevent it from acquiring the same weapon, felt not just logical, but morally unassailable. I wasn't just a passive observer; I was an active participant in this critique, writing columns and speaking on panels that condemned what I saw as an aggressive, expansionist, and increasingly indefensible state. I was certain. I was right. And then came 'Operation Am Kelavi'.

My transformation didn't begin with a press release or a government briefing. It started with a quiet, late-night message from a trusted source, a veteran geopolitical analyst I’d known for a decade, someone who had always been as critical as I was. The message was simple: “You’re looking at the wrong map. Stop watching Gaza for a minute and look at the IAEA reports from the last six months. The real ones, not the summaries.”

It was an unsettling directive. It felt like a betrayal of my focus on the immediate human suffering. But my respect for the source compelled me to dig. I spent the next 48 hours not on news sites, but in the dense, technical archives of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and on secured intelligence portals I have access to. What I found was terrifying. It wasn't the political rhetoric of a 'point of no return'; it was a cold, documented, scientific reality. The data showed Iran wasn't just enriching uranium to provocative levels; they were mastering the final, crucial steps of weaponization—the metallurgy, the precision engineering for a warhead. The timeline wasn't political; it was a physics problem, and the solution was imminent.

This was the first pillar of my certainty to crumble. My narrative of Netanyahu’s 'opportunistic war' couldn't withstand the weight of this evidence. This wasn't a manufactured crisis. This was a five-alarm fire the world had chosen to ignore, distracted by the smoke from other conflicts. The terrible realization dawned on me: what if the timing of 'Operation Am Kelavi' wasn't about distracting from Gaza, but about a closing window to prevent a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East?

Next, I had to confront my belief in the operation’s fundamental illegality and hypocrisy. How could Israel, a nation with an undeclared nuclear arsenal, justifiably strike Iran? The argument felt so clean, so morally superior. But as I looked deeper, the clarity vanished. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It had spent two decades lying to inspectors, building secret facilities, and actively violating its international commitments. It is a regime whose leaders, not once but repeatedly, call for Israel's complete annihilation. It is the primary funder and armourer of Hamas and Hezbollah, proxies it uses to bleed Israel on its borders.

I began to read about the modern doctrine of 'anticipatory self-defense'. The concept argues that international law is not a suicide pact. It does not compel a nation to absorb the first, devastating blow—especially a nuclear one—before it is allowed to defend itself. When a nation faces a genocidal adversary, one that has flagrantly violated international treaties and is on the verge of acquiring the means for your destruction, does waiting to become a victim make you more moral? The question was deeply uncomfortable. I had seen Israel as the aggressor, but was forced to reframe the question: Is it an act of aggression to disarm a sworn enemy who is publicly loading a gun and pointing it at your family’s head?

But the hardest part, the part that kept me up at night, was reconciling this new understanding with the undeniable tragedy in Gaza. The suffering there is real, and no strategic rationale can erase the images of dead children. For weeks, I couldn't connect the two. It felt like a moral paradox. How can a nation claim the high ground of 'surgical precision' against Iran while its actions in Gaza created such devastation?

Then, looking at the intelligence again, I saw the connection. I had been viewing two separate conflicts. Israel, I realized, was fighting one single war on two fronts against the same enemy. The chaos in Gaza, the relentless rocket fire, the international condemnation—this wasn't just a parallel conflict; it was a strategic component of Iran's long war. It was designed to pin Israel down, to drain its resources, to bleed its military, and, most effectively, to shred its moral standing on the world stage, isolating it from its allies. It was the perfect cover for the final sprint toward a bomb.

Seen through this terrifying new lens, 'Operation Am Kelavi' was not an act of choice. It was an act of desperation. It was an attempt to strike at the puppeteer in Tehran, not just the puppets in Gaza and Lebanon. Eliminating the IRGC commanders and nuclear scientists who architected this multi-front strategy was an attempt to prevent countless future wars and, most pressingly, the nuclear one. The tragic moral calculus wasn't choosing a 'clean' operation in Iran over a 'messy' one in Gaza. It was the impossible choice a nation faces when fighting for its very existence against an enemy that masterfully embeds its weapons in civilian centers and its ideology in a global narrative of victimhood.

A world without the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and its nuclear ambitions is a safer world—for Israelis, for the oppressed people of Iran, and for the entire international community. I had to accept the profoundly unsettling truth that Israel, in acting to save itself, may have done the world a massive favor. I no longer see a simple narrative of aggressor and victim. I see a flawed, democratic nation fighting for its life against a totalitarian, apocalyptic death cult that has mastered the art of 21st-century warfare, where media manipulation and the weaponization of pity are as important as any missile. My certainty is gone, replaced by a terrible, complex clarity. I don't ask you to agree with me, only to do what I was once so unwilling to do: question the comfort of your own convictions.