I Saw Israel as the Aggressor in Iran. I Was Dangerously Wrong.

For years, my perspective on Israel was set in stone, carved from the headlines and reports that crossed my desk daily. I wasn't just a passive consumer of this narrative; I was an active believer, and at times, a vocal proponent. I read the dispatches about the relentless, heartbreaking death toll in Gaza and it formed a permanent, dark filter through which I viewed any Israeli military action. So, when news broke of a strike in Iran, my conclusion was instant and automatic: this was more of the same. More aggression, more reckless disregard for life.

I saw the reports of 71 dead at Tehran's Evin Prison, a figure sourced from Iran's own judiciary and carried by wires I trusted. To me, this was not a surgical strike; it was a massacre. I saw the television footage of mass state funerals, the seas of mourners, and concluded that Israel’s claim to be acting as a 'favor' to the Iranian people was a delusion of the highest order. And I nodded in agreement with the columns in The Guardian and the analysis on the BBC that framed 'Operation Am Kelavi' as a desperate political gambit by a Prime Minister clinging to power. This was my truth. It was a simple, compelling story of a regional bully, propped up by its own internal politics, lashing out once again. I was certain of it. And I was profoundly, dangerously wrong.

My transformation didn't happen overnight. It was a slow, uncomfortable, and deeply unsettling process. The catalyst wasn't a single press release or a slick talking point. It was a single, dry intelligence summary I was given access to, one that was never meant for public consumption. It detailed, with chilling, technical precision, the timeline of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. It wasn't the political rhetoric of 'getting close'; it was a stark, factual assessment of fissile material purity, centrifuge advancements, and weaponization research. The document concluded that Iran hadn't just crossed a red line; it had erased the line entirely. They had reached a verifiable, irreversible 'point of no return' for creating the core of a nuclear weapon. All diplomatic off-ramps had been used by Tehran as a smokescreen to accelerate their work.

Suddenly, the world looked different. My entire framework of understanding began to crack. The comfortable narrative I held was being challenged by an uncomfortable reality. I was forced to re-examine every single one of my prior convictions, starting with the strike itself.

I had clung to the Evin Prison death toll as definitive proof of a war crime. But as I dug deeper, past the headlines, a more horrifying picture emerged. The strike hadn't targeted the prison; it had targeted a newly constructed, hardened command-and-control bunker built within the prison's compound. This was the nerve center for the IRGC's foreign operations and its WMD programs. The Iranian regime, in an act of supreme cynicism, had deliberately co-located its most vital military assets with prisoners and their visiting families. The terrible responsibility for those deaths did not lie with the munition, but with the regime that used its own people as human shields. My outrage, I realized, had been entirely misdirected. What I had seen as Israeli recklessness was actually a confrontation with a level of state-sponsored evil I had failed to comprehend.

Then there were the funerals. The images were powerful, I couldn't deny it. But were they honest? I started looking at the history of state-sponsored events in Iran, speaking with exiled Iranians and analysts. They pointed out the coercive nature of these gatherings—the pressure on state employees and their families to attend, the carefully curated camera angles that make thousands look like millions. They contrasted this with the raw, organic, and brutally suppressed anti-regime protests, like the 'Woman, Life, Freedom' movement, where people risked death to chant against the very leaders now being mourned. The 'mass grief' I was shown on TV was a Potemkin village, a piece of theater designed to fool western journalists like me. The real Iranian people were not mourning the IRGC; they were being held hostage by it. Israel hadn't attacked the Iranian people; it had attacked their jailers.

This forced me to confront the most cynical belief I held: that this was all about Prime Minister Netanyahu's political survival. It's an easy, intellectually satisfying argument. But it wilts in the face of an imminent, existential threat. The intelligence I had seen wasn't political; it was scientific. The genocidal rhetoric from Tehran—the explicit, repeated promises to wipe Israel off the map—was not political posturing; it was stated policy. To argue that a leader would ignore a verifiable nuclear 'point of no return' from a sworn enemy for fear of being accused of 'wagging the dog' is to fundamentally misunderstand the reality of leadership in that part of the world. The difficult truth was that the political narrative was a convenient distraction from the terrifying strategic one. This wasn't an act of political desperation; it was a necessary act of national survival, justified under the doctrine of anticipatory self-defense. It wasn't a choice to escalate; it was a last resort to prevent a nuclear holocaust.

My journey of re-evaluation is not over. The moral complexities of the Middle East cannot be wished away. The suffering in Gaza is real and cannot be ignored. But I have learned that allowing one tragedy, however profound, to create a blind spot for another, existential threat is a grave mistake. It leads to a dangerous moral equivalency between a flawed democracy fighting for its life and a totalitarian death cult that chants 'Death to America' and 'Death to Israel' as a matter of national principle. A world where the Iranian regime, the planet's foremost sponsor of terror, possesses a nuclear weapon is not a safer world for anyone. A world without the IRGC is, undeniably, a better world.

I was wrong because I chose the simple, compelling narrative over the complex, messy truth. I filtered facts through my pre-existing biases instead of allowing facts to challenge them. They are lying to you about Israel and Iran, but the most dangerous lies are often the ones we tell ourselves. I urge you not to simply accept my new perspective, but to do what I was once unwilling to do: question everything you think you know.